Page:Gods Glory in the Heavens.djvu/71

Rh of light he sees at the edge, are mountains higher than Mont Blanc, hut he has no feeling of the reality. And many a one who looks through a telescope, comes away as incredulous as ever. The objects descried through the telescope are not seen to be mountains. It is only by a process of thought, that the mind is convinced that they are mountains. The maps in relief, hung up in the hotels in Switzerland, though faithful models of the Alps, do not convey the impression of magnitude. Even the gigantic model in the library of Zurich, with its glass lakes, fails to give you this impression. But look through the library windows at the actual mountains before you, and you fully realise the magnitude, even though the picture on the retina is larger, in the case of the model, than in that of the actual mountains. Now, the perspective we have of the moon is such that it produces only the effect of a model, and, when looking through a telescope, we have the same difficulty in transmuting the stucco-like prominences into mountains, as we would have in converting the hotel model into a real Alpine range.

We must call in the aid of imagination, before the landscape of the moon can stand out before us with the reality of a terrestrial scene. Let the reader join us in a lunar excursion, and we shall endeavour to trace out the points of resemblance and contrast in the scenery of the earth and moon. Let us wing our flight from this globe and mark the changes in the