The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1905-08-30

cerned more with the writing of text
books than with telescope observation
have laid it down that the moon is a
planetary corpse, which hardly repays
study except for the purpose of revel-
ing in the mathematical charms of it's
wonderfully complex motion. Despite
the fact that almost every special stu
dent of the moon-selenologist he dubs
himself-has noted slight lunar changes
of some kind, and has timidly an
nounced them from time to time, most
of us still cherish the textbook illusion
that the moon is a cold, blackened Gin
der, rushing through space-an orb
which may serve to make poets and
other lunatics pleasantly unhappy, but
which is hardly worth much telescope
scrutiny.
Ever since Calico invented the tele-
scope, we have known that the moon
has it's tall mountains and it's towering.
terraced craters. Although the moon
and the earth were formed of the same
mass, and the life history of the one is
prophetic of the others, these craters,
for chaotic number and startling size,
are quite unlike anything we can dis
play. At the very least there are two
hundred thousand of them; perhaps
there may be a million, assuming, as
we have right to assume, that there
are many too small for magnifcation.
Clustered so closely together are they
that Calico, who was an unscientifcal-
ly poetic soul in spite of his science,
prettily compared them with the eyes
of peacock s tail.
1t has long been surmised that the
lunar craters are dead, every one of
them. tAnd now Professor William H.
Pickering, Harvard astronomer who
has studied the moon for some twenty
years, and who has not confined him
self to the writing of textbooks, as
sures us that, although most of them
are dead, few are still very much
alive.
THE MYSTERIOUS CHANGES OF
LIME.
In great plain, centuries ago pic
turesquely miscalled the Sea of Seren-
ity, is crater christened Lime, after
the great Swedish naturalist. Com
pared with the splendid dimensions of
many similar formations, Lime shrinks
into miserable insignifcance; but al
though it now measures only a paltry
three-quarters of mile in diameter, it
was not always so unpretentions. For
tunately, fairly complete record of
its checkered history has been kept for
nearly three centuries. On a map of
the moon made in 1861, forty years
after Calico introduced the telescope,
it appears as rather noticeable crater.
Diameters at that time could be
measured only with difficulty. Still,
Lime must have been fairly prominent
to have been seen at ALL
Toward the latter end of the eight
eenth century a German selenographer
puts it down as ga very small, round,
brilliant spot When means Of ac-
curate measurement were devised, Lime
proved to be about four miles in diam
eter, and rather deep. Measured re-
peatedly during the last century, it was
rarely found to be the same in size by
two surveyors. One scientist placed It's
diameter at six miles; another at seven.
Once it vanished altogether, only to be
rediscovered as craterlet,' one
quarter of mile across. After that it
grew in size to mile and half; and
now it has shrunk again to three-quar-
tiers of mile. Do extinct volcanoes
change their size so inexplicablya
PLATO AND ITS SHIFTING CONES.
Another striking example of crater
nifcent walled plain considerably
larger than the state of Rhode Island,
and not unlike huge circus-ring in ap-
pearance. Scattered over the dark
floor of the crater are many volcanic
cones, varying in diameter from a few
hundred feet to mile. During the
last twenty-five years that floor has
been examined infinitely for the pur-
pose of fixing the number and position
of the cones. When the first survey
was made, thirty-six were counted. A
second survey revealed thirty-eight.
Later forty-two were mapped. When
ever they We're plotted, some were
found to have shifted about, and some
to have grown less distinct or to have
disappeared entirely, while some were
discovered that We're not marked on
any map.
If Plato is stone dead, as we have
been taught, its twoscore cones show a
mercurial elusiveness hardly compati-
BILE with inactivity. Last year Profess
sor Pickering noted in the great crater
what appeared to lie a crescent shaped
sandbank six miles long, two miles
wide, and a thousand feet high. So
conspicuous is this bank that it must
have been seen in the various surveys
mentioned had it been only family
visible; and yet not single map made
prior to 1904 reveals its presence.
A deep, tortuous abyss known as
Schroeder s Valley has afforded Profes-
scr Pickering an opportunity of actu-
ally seeing what may have been lunar
volcanic eruption. Thick, white clouds
have shot up before his eyes from
Schroeder s Valley, fashing so BRIGHTLY