The Children's Book of Stars. Mitton Geraldine Edith

for us – for instance, it carries sound. Supposing the most terrific volcano exploded in an airless world, it could not be heard. The air serves as a screen by day to keep off the burning heat of the sun's rays, and as a blanket by night to keep in the heat and not let it escape too quickly. If there were no air there could be no water, for all water would evaporate and vanish at once. Imagine the world deprived of air; then the sun's rays would fall with such fierceness that even the strongest tropical sun we know would be as nothing in comparison with it, and every green thing would shrivel up and die; this scorching sun would shine out of a black sky in which the stars would all be visible in the daytime, not hidden by the soft blue veil of air, as they are now. At night the instant the sun disappeared below the horizon black darkness would set in, for our lingering twilight is due to the reflection of the sun in the upper layers of air, and a bitterness of deathly cold would fall upon the earth – cold fiercer than that of the Arctic regions – and everything would be frozen solid. It would need but a short time to reduce the earth to the condition of the moon, where there is nothing to shrivel up, nothing to freeze. Her surface is made up of barren, arid rocks, and her scenery consists of icy black shadows and scorching white plains.

      The black shadows define the mountains, and tremendous mountains they are. Most of them have craters. A crater is like a cup, and generally has a little peak in the middle of it. This is the summit of a volcano, and when the volcano has burst up and vomited out floods of lava and débris, this has fallen down in a ring a little distance away from it, leaving a clear space next to the peak, so that, as the mountain ceases vomiting and the lava cools down, the ring hardens and forms a circular ridge. The craters on the moon are immense, not only in proportion to her size, but immense even according to our ideas on the earth. One of the largest craters in our own world is in Japan, and this measures seven miles across, while in the moon craters of fifty, sixty, and even a hundred miles are by no means uncommon, though there are also hundreds and thousands of smaller ones. We can see the surface of the moon very plainly with the magnificent telescopes that have now been made, and with the best of these anything the size of a large town would be plainly visible. Needless to say, no town ever has been or ever will be seen upon the moon!

      All these mountains and craters show that at one time the moon must have been convulsed with terrific disturbances, far worse than anything that we have any knowledge of on our earth; but this must have been ages ago, while the moon still probably had an atmosphere of its own. Now it has long been quiet. Nothing changes there; even the forces that are always at work on the earth – namely, damp and mould and water – altering the surface and breaking up the rocks, do not act there, where there is no moisture of any sort. So far as we can see, the purpose of the moon is to be the servant of the earth, to give her light by night and to raise the tides. Beautiful light it is, soft and mysterious – light that children do not often have a chance of seeing, for they are generally in bed before the moon rises when she is at the full.

      We know that the moon has no heat of her own – she parted with all that long ago; she cannot give us glowing light from brilliant flames, as the sun does; she shines only by the reflection of the sun on her surface, and this is the reason why she appears to change her shape so constantly. She does not really change; the whole round moon is always there, only part of it is in shadow. Sometimes you can see the dark part as well as the bright. When there is a crescent moon it looks as if it were encircling the rest; some people call it, 'seeing the old moon in the new moon's arms.' I don't know if you would guess why it is we can see the dark part then, or how it is lighted up. It is by reason of our own shining, for we give light to the moon, as she does to us. The sun's rays strike on the earth, and are reflected on to the moon, so that the moon is lighted by earthshine as we are lighted by moonshine, and it is these reflected earth-rays that light up the dark part of the moon and enable us to see it. What a journey these rays have had! They travel from the sun to the earth, and the earth to the moon, and then back to the earth again! From the moon the earth must appear a much bigger and more glorious spectacle than she does to us – four times wider across and probably brighter – for the sun's light strikes often on our clouds, which shine more brilliantly than her surface.

      Once again we must use an illustration to explain the subject. Set a lamp in the middle of a dark room, and let that be the sun, then take a small ball to represent the earth and a smaller one for the moon. Place the moon-ball between the lamp and the earth-ball. You will see that the side turned to the earth-ball is dark, but if you move the moon to one side of the earth, then from the earth half of it appears light and half dark; if you put it right away from the lamp, on the outer side of the earth, it is all gloriously lit up, unless it happens to be exactly behind the earth, when the earth's shadow will darken it. This is the full explanation of all the changes of the moon.

      Does it ever fall within the earth's shadow? Yes, it does; for as it passes round the earth it is not always at the same level, but sometimes a little higher and sometimes a little lower, and when it chances to pass exactly behind it enters the shadow and disappears. That is what we call an eclipse of the moon. It is nothing more than the earth's shadow thrown on to the moon, and as the shadow is round that is one of the proofs that the earth is round too. But there is another kind of eclipse – the eclipse of the sun; and this is caused by the moon herself. For when she is nearest to the sun, at new moon – that is to say, when her dark side is toward us, and she happens to get exactly between us and the sun – she shuts out the face of the sun from us; for though she is tiny compared with him, she is so much nearer to us that she appears almost the same size, and can blot him right out. Thus the eclipses of both sun and moon are not difficult to understand: that of the moon can only happen at full moon, when she is furthest from the sun, and it is caused by the earth's shadow falling upon the moon; and that of the sun at new moon, when she is nearest to him, and it is caused by the solid body of the moon coming between us and the sun.

      Besides giving us light by night, the moon serves other important purposes, and the most important of all is the raising of the tides. Without the rising of the sea twice in every day and night our coasts would become foul and unwholesome, for all the dead fish and rotting stuff lying on the beach would poison the air. The sea tides scour our coasts day by day with never-ceasing energy, and they send a great breath of freshness up our large rivers to delight many people far inland. The moon does most of this work, though she is a little helped by the sun. The reason of this is that the moon is so near to the earth that, though her pull is a comparatively small one, it is very strongly felt. She cannot displace the actual surface to any great extent, as it is so solid; but when it comes to the water she can and does displace that, so that the water rises up in answer to her pull, and as the earth turns round the raised-up water lags behind, reaching backward toward the moon, and is drawn up on the beach, and makes high tide. But it is stopped there, and meantime, by reason of the earth's movement, the moon is left far behind, and pulls the water to itself further on, when the first high tide relapses and falls down again. At length the moon gets round to quite the opposite side of the earth to that where she began, and there she makes a high tide too; but as she draws the water to herself she draws also the solid earth beneath the water to her in some degree, and so pulls it away from the place where the first high tide occurred, leaving the water there deeper than before, and so causing a secondary high tide.

      The sun has some influence on the tides too, and when moon and sun are in the same line, as at full and new moon, then the tides are highest, and are called spring tides; but when they pull in different directions, as when it is half-moon, then the tides are lowest and are called neap tides.

      CHAPTER IV

      THE EARTH'S BROTHERS AND SISTER

      The earth is not the only world that, poised in space, swings around the sun. It is one of a family called the Solar System, which means the system controlled and governed by the sun. When we look up at the glorious sky, star-studded night by night, it might seem to us that the stars move only by reason of the earth's rotation; but when men first began to study the heavens attentively – and this is so long ago that the record of it is not to be found – they noticed that, while every shining object in the sky was apparently moving round us, there were a few which also had another movement, a proper motion of their own, like the moon. These curious stars, which appeared to wander about among the other stars, they called planets, or wanderers. And the reason, which was presently discovered, of our being able to see these movements