have done so much as Newton actually achieved. This is the highest praise which could be given to any astronomer short of saying that he was Newton's equal. Now see how the great mathematician failed when he employed his powers to show in what way the work of the Almighty might be improved. He showed how a certain advantage might have been obtained had a certain special arrangement been adopted. So far all was well. But he omitted to observe how much more would be lost than would be gained by the proposed alteration. His scheme was conceived in the spirit of the remark made by Alphonsus, king of Portugal, who, speaking of the system of the universe as understood in his day, said that if the Almighty had consulted him when the universe was about to be created, he could have given useful advice. Alphonsus was in one sense right, since his remark, ugly though it sounds, was really intended to imply no more than that, in his opinion, astronomers had not in his day discovered the true system of the universe. But had Laplace been consulted when the moon's position and path were designed (to use such words for want of better), and if his advice had been adopted, we should have had a moon which would have subserved but one out of four highly important services actually rendered to us by her. Well might Laplace have been answered by the Almighty, even as of old He answered Job out of the whirlwind, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird

up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? ... Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place. . . . Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? ... Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?'

I will draw this portion of my subject to a conclusion by calling attention to one feature of the moon, which, though it does not tend in any way to increase the comforts of the human race, has been of great importance so far as their acquisition of knowledge has been concerned. I refer to the near agreement in point of apparent size between the sun and the moon, two globes which differ so remarkably as to their real dimensions. The agreement is so close that as the sun and moon slightly vary in apparent size, according to their slightly varying distances, the moon looks sometimes slightly greater and sometimes slightly less than the sun. Now, it is easily seen that if this relation had not existed—and it is in a sense merely fortuitous, not existing in the case of any other planet

which has a moon-we should know very much less than we actually know about our sun. If the moon had a disc much smaller than the sun's there would never be a total eclipse of the sun, and all those wonderful objects which make their appearance when the sun is totally eclipsedthe coloured prominences and the sierra, the glowing inner corona, and the radiated fainter glory which lies outside the corona-would have been altogether unknown to us. But we should scarcely have learned more if the moon had had a disc much larger than the sun's. For in that case when a total eclipse began, all the region round the sun, except that close to the part of the sun's face concealed last, would be hidden by the moon's much larger disc. At the middle of totality, the red prominences and sierra, as well as all the brighter part of the corona, would be altogether concealed from view. And, lastly, at the end of totality the same state of things would prevail as at the beginning, only now it would be close to the part of the sun just about to appear, that for a moment or two the red prominences would be visible. Manifestly it would be quite hopeless under such circumstances to attempt to obtain any satisfactory observations of the solar surroundings. We now see during totality the complete ring of prominences for two or three minutes, and the whole of the corona is shown. Even as thus shown it has been sufficiently difficult to ascertain the nature of these objects. But with a moon much larger than ours we could have learned scarcely anything

respecting them, and with a moon much smaller we should have known absolutely nothing of the solar appendages.

III.

With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb'st the sky,—
How silently and with how wan a face !-WORDSWORTH.

IN this, the third and concluding part of my essay on the Queen of Night, I propose to consider her not as a mere satellite or attendant on the earth, but as a planet or other world, possibly, though not probably, an inhabited world.

It may seem strange, perhaps, to some of my readers to find the moon spoken of as a planet. We are so accustomed to view the moon as a relatively small body circling around our earth, and directly subordinate to the require ments of her inhabitants, that it is only by an effort of the imagination that we can rise to the conception of her real position in the scheme of worlds circling around the sun. But in reality the moon is governed in her motions mainly by the sun; she circles around him rather than around the earth, though, viewed from our terrestrial standpoint, she appears to obey the earth's influence more directly than the sun's. If the moon could be watched from some distant point whence the whole solar system could be seen, her course around the sun would be seen to resemble that followed by a planet. This course

may be described as nearly circular, and slightly eccentric, insomuch that while her mean distance is about ninetyone millions of miles, she is some 1,500,000 miles nearer to the sun in December and January than in June and July. This, let it be noticed, is precisely what we should say of the earth's path; and all that has to be added to the description of the moon's path is that, in a period of about four weeks, she passes alternately farther from the sun and nearer to him than her mean path by about 240,000 miles, a mere trifle, it will be seen, compared with the dimensions of her actual path round the sun. Nor is it true, as I have sometimes seen stated in books on astronomy, that the moon follows a spiral or twisted path, owing to her movement around the earth, combined with her movement round the sun. If a perfectly exact representation of the moon's path were made in very fine wire, on a tolerably large scale, it would require the nicest scrutiny to distinguish the wire curve from a perfect circle. Again, if we represented the earth's path by a wire circle a foot in diameter, and one-thirtieth1 of an inch in thickness, the moon's path would be wholly included within the substance of that wire, passing alter

The

1 Rather less than a thirtieth, more exactly a thirty-third part. reader should take an ordinary foot-rule, divided into inches and tenths of an inch; then one-third of one of these tenths will correspond to the greatest range of the moon within and without the earth's path, where this path is represented by a circle a foot in diameter. On the same scale the sun would be represented by a little globe rather less than two-thirds of the tenth of an inch in diameter, and about one-tenth of an inch from the centre of the circle.