nor rain, nor even water, nor atmosphere on the moon. What looks so ice-like in the telescope is merely (it would seem) the bare rocks glittering in the sunlight.
"Tycho." The metropolitan crater of the moon. His diameter is estimated.
"So I went forward .... to the great circle of Copernicus." The following eloquent description from "The Moon," by Nasmyth and Carpenter, maybe worth quoting, as showing how some of our descriptions are not exaggerated. "Let us choose, for instance, the hillside of Copernicus . . . As hour succeeds hour, the sunbeams reach peak after peak of the circular rampart in slow succession, till at length the circle is complete, and the vast crater-rim, fifty miles in diameter, glistens like a silver-margined abyss of darkness. By-and-by appears a group of bright peaks and bosses. These are the now illuminated summits of the central cones, and the development of the mountain-cluster they form henceforth becomes an imposing feature of the scene. From our high standpoint, and looking backwards to the sunny side of our cosmorama, we glance over a vast region of the wildest desolation. Craters, from five miles diameter downwards, crowd together in countless numbers to the surface,—as far as the eye can reach looks veritably frothed over with them." "The Moon," pp. 164, 165.
Venus.
"Whence the mighty Alps." This description is not imaginary. I saw it in February, 1872, more than once in the neighbourhood of Lake Biehne. I have often thought since that it admirably represented the way Mars appears
