Through Magic Glasses and Other Lectures

med upon him through the open shutter in the wooden dome above. It is true a faint gleam of warmer light shone from below through the open door, for this ro

he implements of his art around him looked like weird gaunt skeleto

which the moon was moving. In the centre of the room, with its long tube directed towards the opening, stood the largest magic glass, the Telescope, and in the dead stillness of the night, could be heard distinctly the tick-tick of the clockwork, which kept the instrument pointing to the face of the moon, while the room, and all in it, was being carried sl

s the centre of the table, where six glass prisms were arranged in a semicircle, each one fixed on a small brass tripod. A strange uncanny-looking instrument this, especially as the prisms caught the edge of the glow streaming up the turret stair, and shot forth faint beam

. Lying around it were other curious prisms mounted in metal rims and fitted with tubes and many strange devices, not to be understood b

tural and familiar, yet it, too, had puzzling plates and apparatus on the table near it, which could be fitted on to the telescope, so that by their means pictures might b

ate, which belonged in one sense more to our earth, since everything examined by it had to be brought near, and lie close under its magnifying-glass. Yet the Microscope too could carry its master into an unseen world,

for he was waiting to watch an event which brought some new interest every time it took place-a total eclipse of the moon. To-night he looked forward to it eagerly, for it happened that, just as the moon would pass into the shadow of our earth, it

ublic school for boys of the artisan class. He had erected a well-planned and handsome building in the midst of the open country, and received there, on terms within the means of their parents, working-lads from all parts of England, who, besides the usual

that labour as well as money had been spent in decorating them. It was a large oblong room, with four windows to the north, and four to the south, in each of which stood a microscope with all the tubes, needles, forceps, knives, etc., necessary for dissecting and pr

ect spectroscopes which the lads could use for themselves. But nowhere was a telescope to be seen. This was not because there were none, for each table had its small hand-telescope, cheap but good. The truth is t

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ting the phase

elow the direct line between his eye and it, he will see only the dark side of the ball, and the moon will be on the point of being "new." Then as he turns slowly, a thin crescent of light will creep over the side nearest the sun, and by degrees encroach more and more, so that when he has turned through one quarter of the round half the disc will be light. When he has turned another quarter, and has his back to the sun, a full moon will face him. Then as he turns on through the third quarter a crescent of darkness creeps slowly over the side away from the sun, and gradually the bright disc is eaten away by sha

what so few people understand, namely, that though the moon describes a complete circle round our earth every month, yet she does not describe a circle in space, but a wavy line inwards and outwards ac

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ction of the arrows. The earth moves along the dark line, the moon along the interrupted line - - - -. The dot

interrupted line - - - - between us and the sun. During the next week her quarter of a circle will carry her round behind the earth, so that we see her on the 17th as a full moon, yet her actual movement has been onwards along the interrupted line on the farther side of the earth. During the third week she creeps round another quarter of a circle so as to be in advance of the earth on its yearly journey round the sun, and reache

s once on her axis during the month that she is travelling round the earth. On this map were marked all the different craters, mountains, plains and shining streaks which appear on the moo

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in their appearance which take place as daylight or darkness creeps over them. They could not however pick out more than some of the chief points. Only the magician himself knew every crater and ridge under all i

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n. (From Bal

le I point out the chief features. See first, there are the grey plains (A, C, G, etc.) lying chiefly in the lower half of the moon. You can often see these on a clea

hrough the telescope, is it not difficult to imagine how people could ever have pictured them as a man's face? But not so difficult to understand how some ancient nations thought the moon was a kind of mirror, in which our earth was refl

es like the rays of a star, covering a large part of the moon. Brightest of all these starred craters is Tycho, which you will easily find near the top of the moon (I, Fig. 3), for you have often seen it in the small telescope. How grand it looks to-night in the full moon (Fig. 3a)! It is true you see all the craters

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his surr

f the moon taken by

e full moon this enormous cup is dark compared to the bright rim, but it is much better seen in about the middle of the second quarter, when the rising sun begins to light up one side while the other is in black night. The drawing on the wall (Fig. 4), which is taken from an actual photograph of the moon's face, shows Tycho at this time surrounded by the numerous other c

ds it there spring on all sides those strange brilliant streaks (see Fig. 3a) which I spoke of just now. There are others quite as bright, or even brighter, round other craters, Co

in the curve to the right, while a dense shadow lies in the left hollow, these streaks are only faint, and among the many craters around (see Fig. 4) you might even have some difficulty at first in find

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e, showing how it resembles

to solve, as we learn more and more how to us

the surface of the moon, the hollow of the cup forming a depression below it. The peak of Teneriffe (Fig. 5), which is a dormant volcano, is a good copy in miniature on our earth of many craters on the moon. The large plain surrounded by a high rocky wall, broken in places by lava streams, the smaller craters nestling in

and filled with molten lava from below, as water oozes up through ice-cracks on a pond. But this explanation is not quite satisfactory, for the lava, forcing its way through, would cool in ridges which ought to cast a shadow in sunlight. These streaks, however, not only cast no

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ter Cop

from a drawing taken in a reflectin

, great spurs or ridges stretch in all directions sometimes for more than a hundred miles, and between these are scattered innumerable minute craters. But the most striking feature in it is the ring, which is composed inside the crater of magnificent terraces divided by deep ravines. These terraces are in some ways very like those of the great crater of Teneriffe, and astron

so like mountains on our own globe as these, with their gentle sunny slope down to a plain on the left, and steep perpendicular cliffs on the right. The highest peak in this range, called Huyghens, rises to the height of 21,000 f

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nar Ap

part of a magnificent photograph taken by the

called Archimedes, you will find just below the Lunar Apennines (Figs. 3 and 7), and another called Plato, which is sixty miles broad, is still lower down the moon's face (Figs. 3 and 8). The centres

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seen soon after sunr

and heaving up as it cooled into one great central cone, but seething as molten lead does in a crucible, littl

cept that everything shows that heat and volcanoes have in some way done the work, though no one has ever yet clearly proved that volcanic eruptions have taken place in our time. We must l

except where the rugged traces remain, we shall probably never know. What we now see is a dead worn-out planet, on which we cannot certainly trace any activity except that of heat in the past. That there is no life there now, at any rate of the kind on our own earth, we are almost certain

, as it were by one step, from shadow to sunshine. This in itself is enough to show that there is no air to scatter the sunlight and spread it into the edges of the shade as happens on our earth; but there are other and better proofs. One of these is, that during an eclipse of the sun there is no reflection of his ligh

, forming in them the image of the sun which is already gone. Now in a short time the moon which we are watching will be darkened by our earth coming between it and the sun, and while it is quite dark it will pass over a little bright star. In fact to us the star will appear to set behind the dark moon as the sun sets below the horizon, a

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otal eclipse

passing into the earth's s

closing a space within which all the direct rays of the sun a

ch, behind the earth, part of the sun's rays are

in the earth's atmosphere, so that they pass along the path mar

f the sun's rays; and soon a deep black shadow creeping over Aristarchus and Plato showed that she was passing into that darker space or umbra where the body of the earth is completely between her and the

clipsed was not wholly dark, but tinted with a very faint bluish-green light, which changed almost imperceptibly, as the eclipse went on, to rose-red, and then to a fiery copper-coloured glow as the moon crept entirely into the shadow and became all dark. The lad watching through his small telescope noted this weird light, and won

great matter-would the star give any further clue to the question of an atmosphere round the moon? Would its light linger even for a moment, like the light of the setting sun? Nearer and nearer came the dark moon; the star shone brilliantly against its darkness; one second and it was gone. The long looked-for moment had passed, a

lence was broken, "tell me why did that strang

efracted or bent, and so were thrown within the shadow cast by our earth, and fell upon the moon. If there were such a person as a 'man in the moon,' that lurid light would prove to him that our earth has an atmosphere. The cause of the tints is the same which gives us our sunset colours, because as the different c

is pupil went down the turret stairs and past through the room below. As they did so they heard in the distance a scuffling noise like that of rats in the wall. A smile