Page:A discovery that the moon has a vast population of human beings.djvu/60

 dred miles or so wide, with precipitous sides. Mitchell has vividly described these terrible places. Those who have looked over a precipice a few hundred feet in depth may perhaps form some rude idea of what it must be to gaze down into a hole fifty miles deep—so deep that the bottom would almost escape the eye, were there an intervening atmosphere —a great, monstrous cave, with no vegetation either on the borders or on the top, or on the sides or on the bottom; no life of any kind, not even the least sound, to break the endless monotony of silence—everywhere dull, warm scoriæ, lava, and stones of volcanic origin. But even these are the smallest of the lunar cavities. Latterly, acute astronomers, with improved instruments, have gazed into holes in the moon's surface, and estimated them to be no less than two hundred and fifty and three hundred miles deep, with fissures in them through which the sunlight penetrated.

Fancy the scene! Well may it have been termed the abomination of desolation! Surely this fair earth, with all its gloomy places and all its dreary scenes, contains nothing so overwhelming in its terrible despair as the moon. And who, gazing at its wild white face as it emerges from the cover of a cloud, would deem it so sad and desolate a sphere?

There are no "men in the moon." There cannot be, for they could not exist without air and water. 'Tis a pity, for the sight of this planet of ours, thirteen times the size which the moon appears to us, as fair, and bright, and shining as our nightly luminary, would be a sight worth seeing.

Science has made such progress, and common sense has so far kept pace with it, that the old idea that this was the only inhabited sphere in the universe is now completely exploded. There is no reason to believe that our planet is the only one in our solar system which is devoted to a useful career; nor is there any ground for imagining that our sun is the only one of the myriad of suds we see every night, which gives light, and heat, and happiness to human creatures. On the contrary, the supreme wisdom of the Deity affords a fair presumption that this little planet of ours is but as a grain of sand among the worlds which have been created for the glory of God, and that each planet after its kind is fitted for the habitation of creatures whose office and purpose it is to thank and bless Him for their existence. Moons may be an exception for a time.

Of all this we know but little, and can only conjecture vaguely. As science advances, we may have telescopic instruments so superior to those now in use that we shall be able to decipher the moon's surface as