2. How far are there indications of animated beings?
3. Where are the greatest and plainest traces of art on the surface of the moon?
With respect to the first question, it appears from the observations of Schroter and Gruithausen, that the vegetation on the moon’s surface extends to fifty-five south latitude, and sixty-five north latitude. Many hundred observations show, in the different colours and monthly changes, three kinds of phenomena which cannot possibly be explained, except by the process of vegetation.
To the second question it is answered, that the indications from which the existence of living beings is inferred, are found from fifty north latitude, to thirty-seven, and perhaps forty-seven, south latitude.
The answer to the third question, points out the places on the moon’s surface in which are appearances of artificial causes altering the surface. The author examines the appearances that induce him to infer that there are artificial roads in various directions; and he describes a colossal edifice, resembling our cities, on the most fertile part near the moon’s equator, standing accurately according to the four cardinal points. The main cities are in angles of forty-five degrees and ninety degrees. A building resembling what is called a star-redoubt, the professor presumes to be dedicated to religious purposes, and as they can see no stars in the daytime (their atmosphere being so pure) he thinks that they worship the stars, and consider the earth as a natural clock. His essay is accompanied by plates.
The sombre sadness of the evening shades
Steal slowly o’er the wild sequester’d glen,
And seem to make its loneliness more lonely—
In ages past, nature was here convuls’d,
And, with a sudden and terrific crash,
Asunder rent the adamantine hills—
Now, as exhausted with the pond’rous work,
She lies extended in a deathful trance—
The mountains form her couch magnificent;
Heaven’s glittering arch her canopy;
The snows made paler by the rising moon,
Her gorgeous winding sheet; and the dark rocks
That cast deep shadows on the expanse below,
The sable ’scutcheon of the mighty dead—
The roar of waters, and the north wind’s moan
Give music meet for her funereal dirge.
Yon giant crag, the offspring of her throes,
Has rear’d his towering bulk a thousand years,
Grown hoary in the war of elements,
And still defies the thunder, and the storm
But in his summer pride, his stately form
Is mantled o’er with purple, green, and gold,
And his huge head is garlanded with flowers.