The Slowly Receding Moon. LUNAR BODY MAY HAVE BEEN BORN OF OUR EARTH MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO.

Progress, Volume I, Issue 4, 1 February 1906, Page 82

The Slowly Receding Moon. LUNAR BODY MAY HAVE BEEN BORN OF OUR EARTH MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO.

" Looking back through the mists of time we see the moon ever drawing nearer and nearer to the earth. Our satellite now revolves at a distance of 240,000 miles, but there was a time when that distance was itaUnore than 200,000 miles, There was a time millions of years ago, no doubt, when the moon was but 100,000 miles away ; and as we look further and further back we see the moon ever drawing closer and closer to the earth, until at last we discern the critical'^penod in earth-moon history when our globe was "spinning round in a period of five or si hours," writes Sir Robert Ball, m Book lovers' Magazine. " Trie 3 moon, instead of revolving where we now find it, was actually close to the earth; earlier still it was, m fact, touching our globe, and the moon and the earth were revolving each around the other, like a football and a tennis ball actually fastened together." , " It is impossible to resist taking one step further. We know that the earth was, at an. early period, a soft molten mass of matter, spinning round rapidly. The speed seems to have been so great that a rupture took place, a portion of the molten matter broke away from the parent globe, and the fragments coalesced into a small globe. That the moon was thus born of our earth uncounted millions of years ago is the lesson which mathematicians declare they learn from the murmur of the tides.