CHAPTER V.
THE ROMANCE OF THE MOON.
A spectator endowed with infinite power of sight, and placed at theunknown centre round which gravitates the universe, would have seenmyriads of atoms filling all space during the chaotic epoch of creation.But by degrees, as centuries went on, a change took place; a law ofgravitation manifested itself which the wandering atoms obeyed; theseatoms, combined chemically according to their affinities, formedthemselves into molecules, and made those nebulous masses with which thedepths of the heavens are strewed.
These masses were immediately animated by a movement of rotation roundtheir central point. This centre, made of vague molecules, began to turnon itself whilst progressively condensing; then, following the immutablelaws of mechanics, in proportion as its volume became diminished bycondensation its movement of rotation was accelerated, and these twoeffects persisting, there resulted a principal planet, the centre of thenebulous mass.
By watching attentively the spectator would then have seen othermolecules in the mass behave like the central planet, and condense inthe same manner by a movement of progressively-accelerated rotation, andgravitate round it under the form of innumerable stars. The nebulae, ofwhich astronomers count nearly 5,000 at present, were formed.
Amongst these 5,000 nebulae there is one that men have called the MilkyWay, and which contains eighteen millions of stars, each of which hasbecome the centre of a solar world.
If the spectator had then specially examined amongst these eighteenmillions of stars one of the most modest and least brilliant, a star ofthe fourth order, the one that proudly named itself the sun, all thephenomena to which the formation of the universe is due would havesuccessively taken place under his eyes.
In fact, he would have perceived this sun still in its gaseous state,and composed of mobile molecules; he would have perceived it turning onits own axis to finish its work of concentration. This movement,faithful to the laws of mechanics, would have been accelerated by thediminution of volume, and a time would have come when the centrifugalforce would have overpowered the centripetal, which causes the moleculesall to tend towards the centre.
Then another phenomenon would have passed before the eyes of thespectator, and the molecules situated in the plane of the equator wouldhave formed several concentric rings like that of Saturn round the sun.In their turn these rings of cosmic matter, seized with a movement ofrotation round the central mass, would have been broken up intosecondary nebulae--that is to say, into planets.
If the spectator had then concentrated all his attention on theseplanets he would have seen them behave exactly like the sun and givebirth to one or more cosmic rings, origin of those secondary bodieswhich we call satellites.
Thus in going up from the atom to the molecule, from the molecule to thenebulae, and from the nebulae to the principal star, from the principalstar to the sun, from the sun to the planet, and from the planet to thesatellite, we have the whole series of transformations undergone by thecelestial powers from the first days of the universe.
The sun seems lost amidst the immensities of the stellar universe, andyet it is related, by actual theories of science, to the nebula of theMilky Way. Centre of a world, and small as it appears amidst theethereal regions, it is still enormous, for its size is 1,400,000 timesthat of the earth. Around it gravitate eight planets, struck off fromits own mass in the first days of creation. These are, in proceedingfrom the nearest to the most distant, Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars,Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Between Mars and Jupiter circulateregularly other smaller bodies, the wandering _debris_, perhaps, of astar broken up into thousands of pieces, of which the telescope hasdiscovered eighty-two at present. Some of these asteroids are so smallthat they could be walked round in a single day by going at a gymnasticpace.
Of these attendant bodies which the sun maintains in their ellipticalorbit by the great law of gravitation, some possess satellites of theirown. Uranus has eight, Saturn eight, Jupiter four, Neptune threeperhaps, and the Earth one; this latter, one of the least important ofthe solar world, is called the Moon, and it is that one that theenterprising genius of the Americans means to conquer.
The Queen of Night, from her relative proximity and the spectaclerapidly renewed of her different phases, at first divided the attentionof the inhabitants of the earth with the sun; but the sun tires theeyesight, and the splendour of its light forces its admirers to lowertheir eyes.
The blonde Phoebe, more humane, graciously allows herself to be seen inher modest grace; she is gentle to the eye, not ambitious, and yet shesometimes eclipses her brother the radiant Apollo, without ever beingeclipsed by him. The Mahommedans understood what gratitude they owed tothis faithful friend of the earth, and they ruled their months at 29-1/2days on her revolution.
The first people of the world dedicated particular worship to thischaste goddess. The Egyptians called her Isis, the Phoenicians Astarte,the Greeks Phoebe, daughter of Jupiter and Latona, and they explainedher eclipses by the mysterious visits of Diana and the handsomeEndymion. The mythological legend relates that the Nemean lion traversedthe country of the moon before its apparition upon earth, and the poetAgesianax, quoted by Plutarch, celebrated in his sweet lines its softeyes, charming nose, and admirable mouth, formed by the luminous partsof the adorable Selene.
But though the ancients understood the character, temperament, and, in aword, moral qualities of the moon from a mythological point of view, themost learned amongst them remained very ignorant of selenography.
Several astronomers, however, of ancient times discovered certainparticulars now confirmed by science. Though the Arcadians pretendedthey had inhabited the earth at an epoch before the moon existed, thoughSimplicius believed her immovable and fastened to the crystal vault,though Tacitus looked upon her as a fragment broken off from the solarorbit, and Clearch, the disciple of Aristotle, made of her a polishedmirror upon which were reflected the images of the ocean--though, inshort, others only saw in her a mass of vapours exhaled by the earth, ora globe half fire and half ice that turned on itself, other _savants_,by means of wise observations and without optical instruments, suspectedmost of the laws that govern the Queen of Night.
Thus Thales of Miletus, B.C. 460, gave out the opinion that the moon waslighted up by the sun. Aristarchus of Samos gave the right explanationof her phases. Cleomenus taught that she shone by reflected light.Berose the Chaldean discovered that the duration of her movement ofrotation was equal to that of her movement of revolution, and he thusexplained why the moon always presented the same side. Lastly,Hipparchus, 200 years before the Christian era, discovered someinequalities in the apparent movements of the earth's satellite.
These different observations were afterwards confirmed, and otherastronomers profited by them. Ptolemy in the second century, and theArabian Aboul Wefa in the tenth, completed the remarks of Hipparchus onthe inequalities that the moon undergoes whilst following the undulatingline of its orbit under the action of the sun. Then Copernicus, in thefifteenth century, and Tycho Brahe, in the sixteenth, completely exposedthe system of the world and the part that the moon plays amongst thecelestial bodies.
At that epoch her movements were pretty well known, but very little ofher physical constitution was known. It was then that Galileo explainedthe phenomena of light produced in certain phases by the existence ofmountains, to which he gave an average height of 27,000 feet.
After him, Hevelius, an astronomer of Dantzig, lowered the highestaltitudes to 15,000 feet; but his contemporary, Riccioli, brought themup again to 21,000 feet.
Herschel, at the end of the eighteenth century, armed with a powerfultelescope, considerably reduced the preceding measurements. He gave aheight of 11,400 feet to the highest mountains, and brought down theaverage of different heights to little more than 2,400 feet. ButHerschel was mistaken too, and the observations of Schroeter, Louville,Halley, Nasmyth, Bianchini, Pastorff, Lohrman, Gruithuysen, andespecially the patient studies of MM. Boeer and Moedler, we
re necessaryto definitely resolve the question. Thanks to these _savants_, theelevation of the mountains of the moon is now perfectly known. Boeer andMoedler measured 1,905 different elevations, of which six exceed 15,000feet and twenty-two exceed 14,400 feet. Their highest summit towers to aheight of 22,606 feet above the surface of the lunar disc.
At the same time the survey of the moon was being completed; sheappeared riddled with craters, and her essentially volcanic nature wasaffirmed by each observation. From the absence of refraction in the raysof the planets occulted by her it is concluded that she can have noatmosphere. This absence of air entails absence of water; it thereforebecame manifest that the Selenites, in order to live under suchconditions, must have a special organisation, and differ singularly fromthe inhabitants of the earth.
Lastly, thanks to new methods, more perfected instruments searched themoon without intermission, leaving not a point of her surfaceunexplored, and yet her diameter measures 2,150 miles; her surface isone-thirteenth of the surface of the globe, and her volumeone-forty-ninth of the volume of the terrestrial spheroid; but none ofher secrets could escape the astronomers' eyes, and these clever_savants_ carried their wonderful observations still further.
Thus they remarked that when the moon was at her full the disc appearedin certain places striped with white lines, and during her phasesstriped with black lines. By prosecuting the study of these with greaterprecision they succeeded in making out the exact nature of these lines.They are long and narrow furrows sunk between parallel ridges, borderinggenerally upon the edges of the craters; their length varied from ten toone hundred miles, and their width was about 1,600 yards. Astronomerscalled them furrows, and that was all they could do; they could notascertain whether they were the dried-up beds of ancient rivers or not.The Americans hope, some day or other, to determine this geologicalquestion. They also undertake to reconnoitre the series of parallelramparts discovered on the surface of the moon by Gruithuysen, a learnedprofessor of Munich, who considered them to be a system of elevatedfortifications raised by Selenite engineers. These two still obscurepoints, and doubtless many others, can only be definitely settled bydirect communication with the moon.
As to the intensity of her light there is nothing more to be learnt; itis 300,000 times weaker than that of the sun, and its heat has noappreciable action upon thermometers; as to the phenomenon known as the"ashy light," it is naturally explained by the effect of the sun's raystransmitted from the earth to the moon, and which seem to complete thelunar disc when it presents a crescent form during its first and lastphases.
Such was the state of knowledge acquired respecting the earth'ssatellite which the Gun Club undertook to perfect under all its aspects,cosmographical, geographical, geological, political, and moral.