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 at some time or other paid homage to the Queen of Night , and thanked her for the gentle light which has shown the way to some fair hand.

We say, in blunt scientific terms, that she—or it—is a satellite of the earth, suspended in her—or its—present position by the contrasted attraction of the sun and the earth. This is the unromantic version of the naked fact.

There was a time when the earth was an uncomfortable semi-incandescent mass, in the act of cooling off for practical purposes. The atmosphere was tropical throughout the globe. All things were intensely impregnated—or, as the philosophers say, supersaturated—with carbon. Between the dry land and the waters there was no division. There was no ocean, and consequently to continents. All was bot mud, with here and there a lake or a short river, and here and there a dry, parched, torrid eminence. In those days there were animals and plants, but no human beings. Both animals and plants were like the age in which they flourished—to our notions monstrous, Monsters were the rule, both in the vegetable and the animated world. Creatures were born, and grew to sizes which dwarf the elephant. Plants thrust their beads above the mud, and, in that carboniferous atmosphere, attained heights