Page:A discovery that the moon has a vast population of human beings.djvu/44

 of the lunar sphere, as to leave in many places merely a fringe of illuminated mountains, which are here, therefore, strongly contra-distinguished from the dark and shadowy aspect of the great deep. But peninsulas, promontories, capes, and islands, and a thousand other terrestrial figures, for which we can find no names in the poverty of our geographical nomenclature, are found expanding, sallying forth, or glowing in insular independence, through all the billowy boundlessness of this magnificent ocean. One of the most remarkable of these is & promontory, without a Dame, I believe, in the lunar charts, which starts from an island district denominated Copernicus by the old astronomers, and abounding, as we eventually discovered, with great natural curiosities. This promontory is indeed most singular. Its northern extremity is shaped much like an imperial crown, ba ving a swelling bow, divided and tied down in its centre by a band of hills which is united with its forehead band or base. The two open spaces formed by this division are two lakes, each eighty miles wide; and at the foot of these, divided from them by the band of hills last mentioned, is another lake, larger than the two pat together, and nearly perfectly square. This one is followed, after another hilly division, by a lake of an irregular form; and this one yet again, by two narrow ones, divided longitudinally, which are attenuated northward to the main land. Thus this skeleton promontory of mountain ridges runs 396 miles into the ocean, with six capacious lakes, enclosed within its stony ribs. Blunt's excellent lunar chart gives this great work of nature with wonderful fidelity, and I think you might accompany my description with an engraving from it, much to your reader's satisfaction. (See plate 4.)

"Next to this, the most remarkable formation in this ocean is a strikingly brilliant annular mountain of immense altitude and circumference, standing 330 miles E.S.E., commonly known as Aristarchus (No. 12), and marked in the chart as a large mountain, with a great cavity in its centre. That cavity is now, as it was probably wont to be in ancient ages, a volcanic crater, awfully rivalling our Mounts Etna and Vesuvius in the most terrible epochs of their reign. Unfavorable as the state of the atmosphere was to close examination, we could