Rensselaer Union, Volume 5, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 April 1873 — The Airless Moon. [ARTICLE]

The Airless Moon.

Among the illusions swept away by modern science was the pleasant fancy that the moon was a habitable globe, like the earth, its surface diversified with seas, lakes, continents and islands, and varied forms of vegetation. Theologians and savans gravely discussed the probabilities of its being inhabited by a race of sentient beings with forms and faculties like our own, and even propounded schemes for opening communication with them, in case they existed. One of these was to construct on the broad highlands of Asia a series of geometrical figures on a scale so gigantic as to be visible from our planetary neighbor, on the supposition that the moon people would recognize the object, and immediately construct simitar figures in reply. Extravagant and absurd as it may appear in the light of modern knowledge, the establishment of this Terrestrial and Lunar Signal Service Bureau was treated as a feasible scheme, although practical difficulties, which so often keep men from making fools of themselves, stood in the way of actual experiment; but the discussion was kept up at intervals, until it was discovered that if there were people in the moon, they must be able to live without breathing, or eating, or drinking. Then it ceased. There can be no life without air. Beautiful to the eye of the distant observer, the moon is a sepulchral orb—a world of death and silence. No vegetation clothes its vast plains of stony desolation, traversed by monstrous crevasses, broken by enormoos peaks that rise like gigantic tombstones into space; no lovely forms of cloud float in tha blackness of its sky. There daytime is only night lighted by a rayless sun. There ia no rosy dawn in the morning, no twilight in the evening. The nights are pitch dark. In daytime the solar beams sra lost against the jagged ridges, the sharp points of the rocks, or the steep sides of profound abysses, and the eye sees only grotesques shapes relieved against fantastic shadows black as ink, with none of that pleasant gradation and diffusion of light, noneof the subtle blending of light and shadow which make the charm of a terrestial landscape. A faint conception of the horrors of a lunar day may be formed from an illustration representing a landscape taken in the moon In the center of the mountainous region of Aristarchus. Then is no color, nothing but deaa white and black. The rocks reflect passively the light of the sun; the craters and abysses remain wrapped in shade; fantastic peaks rise like phantoms in their glacial cemetery; the Stars appdir Itt» spots in the blackness of space, moon is a dead world; she has no atmosphere.and AM,” **&& Oam*t> in Harper' t Monthly.