a feature of Russian society; "but I fear you
could not live in it, for there is only room in
the coach-house for five carriages."

THE LESSER LIGHT.

THE "lesser light" that "rules the night"—
otherwise the moon—has been much and
unjustly calumniated. The faults of others have
been laid on her shoulders. In many cases
she has been set down as the guilty party,
when she merely signalised the presence
of evil. Moon-blindness, moon-strokes, and
sundry other misfortunes, are no more
attributable to the moon than they are to you. A
moon-calf only would believe it. The sole fault
of moonwort (although old women use it as a
love-potion) is, that, as a fern, Botrychium
Lunaria, it is neither common nor easy to
cultivate. In short, the moon is a victim of popular
prejudice. It is time that somebody should
stand up for the moon.

But the proprietorship or protectorate of the
moon is disputed. Amongst French savants,
M. Delaunay accuses M. Le Verrier of
considering the moon as his own private property;
nobody but himself has a right to touch or
meddle with it. M. Le Verrier tells M.
Delaunay that he knows nothing about the
moon, and had better let her be quiet; which,
as a matter of course, he declines to do. We
admire M. Delaunay's spirit, being obliged to
him for great part of the contents of this paper.

No one can put his head out of doors on a
bright shiny night without acknowledging the
presence of a remarkable heavenly body. When
the moon is

       Riding near her highest noon,
       Like one that had been led astray
       Through the Heav'ns' wide pathless way,
       And oft, as if her head she bow'd,
       Stooping through a fleecy cloud,

it must be an apathetic gaze which does not admire
her splendour. An intelligent Zulu, commenting
on the "two great lights—the lesser light to rule
the night"—of Genesis, has observed that the
moon, though called a great luminary, has no
light of her own, but only shines with what she
receives from the sun. But light, whether
direct or reflected, is light: and if we had only
direct light to guide us, we should more
frequently than not be wandering in darkness. It
would be ungrateful on our part to deny that
the moon, although a less generous benefactor
than the sun, still bestows a very useful
illumination—not to mention her preventing the sea
from becoming stagnant.

If you had never seen the moon before, we
should be tempted to tell you that from her
successive positions and diverse appearances
we learn that she is not very far distant from
us; that she moves round the earth, describing
in twenty-seven days and a third a nearly
circular orbit, whose radius is equal to sixty
times the radius of the terrestrial globe—i.e. if
the earth were a ball two miles in diameter, the
moon would be sixty miles away; and that her
various aspects or phases are solely due to her
place with respect to the sun, who illumines her.
The moon, while travelling round the earth,
accompanies us in our annual movement round the
sun. She is only a satellite of the earth—quite
a small attendant. The earth is forty-nine
times as big as the moon. The earth's annual
movement round the sun is also performed in
an almost circular orbit, but its dimensions are
quite on a different scale to the moon's. The
distance the earth maintains from the sun is
(as nearly as we know at present) about four
hundred times as great as our distance from the
moon, or twenty-four thousand times the length
of the earth's radius.

The earth and her satellite form only a
portion of the solar system; that is, of the
assemblage of bodies composed of the sun in the
centre and a certain number of planets revolving
round it at greater or less distances, in the same
direction and almost in the same plane. The
earth is one of this family of planets. The
attendance of a satellite dancing round her
while she dances round the sun, is far from
being an exceptional circumstance. Jupiter
has four satellites; Saturn eight, without counting
the singular appendage which encircles him
as a ring, or rings; Uranus six; and Neptune
one. Amongst the principal planets, there are
only Mercury, Venus, and Mars who have laid
down the rule, "No followers allowed."

On casting a bird's eye view over the whole
solar system, it will appear that the moon
is a very small affair. But everything, not
only in this world, but in the universe, is relative;
the child thinks as much of his toy as the
adult of his race-horse or his railway shares.
For us, dwellers on earth, the moon is specially
important, because she is the nearest heavenly
body. If we are inclined to travel into space,
to fathom its depths and see what we can find
there, it is the moon which affords us the very
first stepping-stone on our grand voyage of
discovery. Her close neighbourhood allows us to
investigate the details of her form and
movements; she is the first to initiate us into the
mechanism of the heavens. By the apparent
rapidity of her course compared with that of
other stars, she gives rise to diverse phenomena
which have helped us to solve grave and difficult
problems.

For instance, the moon may fairly claim to
share with the apple the honour of having
led to the discovery of gravitation. Weight,
which makes bodies fall to the ground, is not
confined to the surface of the earth. It exists
on the top of the tallest edifices, at the summits
of the loftiest mountains, without showing any
appreciable sign of growing weaker. It brings
back the stick of the most high-flying rocket;
it draws down hail, rain, and snow, from the
upper regions of the atmosphere. "If weight,"
thought Newton, "has caused this apple to fall
to the ground, why should not weight reach as
far as the moon? Why should not, the moon
have the same tendency as the apple has to fall