Harvest Moon. 537 
of the boatraen who conveyed his troops to the island, he was 
pressed by the British, and thirteen of his men killed, and the rear 
guard of one division, numbering 136 men, taken prisoners. 
In November, 1777, another surprise was attempted by Gen. 
Dickinson, and in the winter of 1779 and '80, a third by Gen. 
Stirling, both were unsuccessful. 
From the time the English obtained pos5?ession of Staten Island 
up to the year 1833, a controversy had existed between the states 
of New York and New Jersey, relative to the right of jurisdiction 
over it. This controversy was at length happily terminated in 
that year by the commissioners, who decided in favor of New 
York, but yielded to New Jersey the jurisdiction over a portion 
of the adjacent waters. 
In a military point of view the island is one of the most im- 
portant positions on the Atlantic coast, its possessor having com- 
mand of New York bay and the adjacent country. 
Staten Island is about fourteen miles long, and its greatest 
breadth eight miles, mean breadth five miles; population about 
14,000.— ^m. Artizan. 
HARVEST MOON. 
Peculiarity — Reason — Hunter's Moon — J\l'ame not appropnatt here — Slow 
Vegetation in England, rapid here, and the cause — Indian Corn not raised 
in England, and why — Propitious climate. 
BY PROF. C. DEWEY. 
The works on Astronomy all mention the harvest moon. It 
occurs at the full moon near the 20th of September, the time of 
the autumnal equinox. The peculiarity is, that there is but a 
little difference in the times of rising of this full moon for several 
evenings. The mean difference is about fifty minutes, and is in 
one part of the year considerably more, but at the harvest moon 
is not one half of the above difference. A few years since, I heard 
a woman exclaim one evening near this equinox, " What is the 
matter with the moon? for she rises at the same time nearly as 
on last evening." She noticed the great peculiarity of the har- 
vest moon. 
The astronomical reason for this fact is obvious — the great 
obliquity of the moon's orbit to our horizon at the autumnal 
equinox, so that the diurnal motion of the earth brings up the 
moon in less time. In latitude as high as that of England, this 
obliquity is greater, and the difference in the times of rising is 
still less, and the appearance is far more striking. In the succeed- 
