Gruithuisen' s City in the Moon. 217 



inaccuracy, there being one transverse line too many on W. 

 side, and all of them being too bright : it had, he says, been 

 very seldom visible, and " selenospherically obscured" for the 

 last year. This astronomer assuredly thought, and published, 

 an uncommon amount of nonsense. If we are to believe him, 

 there is not a trace, ancient or modern, of volcanic action on 

 the Moon, the so-called craters having been formed by the fall 

 of enormous fragments from space (colossal aerolites), whose 

 points still project above the once-plastic surface in the form 

 of central hills. The Moon had been first a comet, then an 

 asteroid, afterwards a satellite, and had been once covered with 

 a primeval sea, deeper than its* highest mountains, on whose 

 features strong marks of degradation remain. He considers 

 the clefts as indications of animal existence, and looks upon 

 some of the smaller ones, which show no embanked edges, 

 and may be 30 to 80 feet in depth, as being probably broad, 

 straight clearings through forests, and forming connections 

 of the nature of roads between all the fertile regions of the 

 lunar surface. The " Selenites" themselves, he owns, we could 

 hardly expect to distinguish individually on their journeys, but 

 does not think it impossible that large bodies of them might 

 be detected in these roads by their difference of colour, espe- 

 cially if meeting and separating again. The regular straight 

 ridges which he describes he does not seem to refer to fortifi- 

 cation, but inclines to the idea of their being the roofs of long 

 inhabited halls, and thinks some of the minute crater- chains, 

 of which such wonderful examples are to be found between 

 Eratosthenes (29) and Copernicus (30), are dwelling-places : — ■ 

 with other dreamy matter of a similar kind. Yet this man 

 made good use of a keen eye and sharp instrument, and saw 

 much, and if he had spared us his inferences, would have been 

 accepted as an observer of no little weight. I have not been 

 able to ascertain whether his intended work, " On the Habita- 

 bility of the Moon, and Traces of its being Inhabited," which 

 was prepared in 1825, but, from his desire of greater complete- 

 ness, remained in MS. in 1836, ever saw the light : and I have 

 not had access to his observations in Kastner's cc Archive," a 

 German scientific periodical of that day ; but it would seem 

 worth the while of some astronomer who has more time at his 

 command than falls to the lot of everybody in these days of 

 speedy progress, to collect and compare his observations, and 

 sift out what may be really worthy of preservation. The 

 occasional verification of some of his assertions sufficiently 

 proves that he was not uniformly mistaken : and we have no 

 reason to suspect him of falsifying the evidence which he 

 turned to such absurd account. 



But it is time to return from the ancient Rhcetiacs, which, 



