NEWS FROM THE MOON.

Hawke's Bay Weekly Times, Volume 1, Issue 49, 9 December 1867, Page 303

NEWS FROM THE MOON.

“ News from the moon,” (says an English cotemporary,) “is a startling heading for intelligence, even these days of sensational things; but it might be prefixed with justice to a recent discovery of the astronomers. There has been a tremendous incident in the history of our satellite. Long ago there used to be a. volcano called Tinne, towards the north of the ‘Ocean of Tranquility,’ where the * Serene Sea,* and the * Lake of Dreams ’ mingle their dark faces. Water there is none, anymore than air iri the silent orb in. question, and these surfaces are supposed to .be only : vast level plains of ’scoriaceous matter. Be they what they may, c Tinne ’ has disappeared from their face! There is neither a crater nor a mountain any longer in its ■ old site, but only a faint pale aureole, like a scar, or knot upon white wood 1 M.M. 1 Flammarion, Delanoy, Jules. Schmidt of : Athens, the Pere Seeehi, and other re--1 nowned * moonists,* !as Artemus Ward was wont to say, are agreed about fact, which suggests all . sorts of speculations. It would seem that the moon is 1 not yet ‘ finished,’ any'more than our own ' globe. Were there any living things to 1 suffer, then, by this volcanic ,catastrophe? i Did a lunar Herculaneum perish ? Were ! the moon vineyards of some unimaginable c airless Pompeii buried’under the flattened * mountain ? Kepler talked about the ‘ pri* 1 volves ’ and ‘ subvolves’ of the satellitethose that see us aiid those that do not seo ' us, as if creatures of some sort existed. ' Why not? They have no atmosphere, it tis true; there ‘forty winks ’ make up a ! night of 350 hours;, and, ; the ‘lunatics* ■ must sometimes feel bitterly, cold ; hut for 1 them to .comprehend a fish is just as imI possible as for us to understand it ; yet there > are fishes, here l One’ fancies there must ' be senses" to witness, so. wonderful a sight ■ as this earth, thirteen, times as big as the moon, at the full, whirling,an endless f BUCJ cession of sea and land, forest and desert, round and round, through a fleecy veil .of ' white and blue and, blacks The. least -we 1 can do, then, in common jgratitude for--1 moonlight, is to trust that the ‘Man in 1 the Moon ’ has settled’ doWn comfortably * to his new geography,, and. ‘is well as can * be expected.’” -