REVIEWS. 
67 
they will prove decidedly interesting and instructive to the larger class whom 
Mr. Proctor more especially addresses, and who have so repeatedly shown 
how much interest they take in Mr. Proctor’s ingenious speculations. 
The contents of the volume are separately entitled : 1 Age of the Sun and 
Earth ; ’ ‘ The Sun in his Glory ; ’ 1 When the Sea was Young ; ’ ‘Is the 
Moon Dead ?’ ‘ The Moon’s Myriad Small Craters ;’ ‘A New Crater on the 
Moon;’ ‘ A Fiery World ; ’ ‘ The Planet of War;’ ‘Living in Dread and 
Terror ; ’ ‘ A Ping of Worlds ‘ Earth-born Meteorites; ’ and the ‘ Architec- 
ture of the Universe.’ 
Of these essays, the one we like best is that called, ‘ The Sun in his 
Glory.’ The weakest one is that on 1 The Moon’s Myriad Small Craters,’ 
because it is founded on a very imperfect acquaintance with the real nature 
of the lunar surface and especially of these very formations — small craters — 
to which he refers. Had they been of the nature supposed by Mr. Proctor, 
his extraordinary theory, that they are indentations of the surface due to the 
impact of large meteors, might be made to read plausible enough, but then 
they are not of the nature supposed, which is unfortunate for the theory, — 
or the Moon. Strangely enough, Mr. Proctor selects Prof. Newcomb as his 
authority for the nature of the lunar surface ; though eminent as Prof. 
Newcomb is in his own departments of Astronomy, his acquaintance with 
the character of the Moon’s surface is necessarily extremely superficial. Mr . 
Proctor’s best essay, entitled ‘ A New Crater on the Moon,’ illustrates one of 
the evils of this system of reprint essays; for however permissible it may 
have been at the time of writing, it is now known to be founded on a mis- 
take as to the identity of the crater supposed to be new, and states as facts 
things now known to be quite erroneous. The two essays on the planet 
Mars will be found most interesting to the general run of readers, as they 
contain some very ingenious speculations. 
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