[18]
[Footnote 18: The Tides, by G.H. Darwin, chapter xvi.]
Born in this manner from the very substance of the earth, the moon would
necessarily be composed, in the main, of the same elements as the globe
on which we dwell, and is it conceivable that it should not have carried
with it both air and water, or the gases from which they were to be
formed? If the moon ever had enough of these prime requisites to enable
it to support forms of life comparable with those of the earth, the
disappearance of that life must have been a direct consequence of the
gradual vanishing of the lunar air and water. The secular drying up of
the oceans and wasting away of the atmosphere on our little neighbor
world involved a vast, all-embracing tragedy, some of the earlier scenes
of which, if theories be correct, are now reenacted on the
half-desiccated planet Mars--a planet, by the way, which in size, mass,
and ability to retain vital gases stands about half-way between the
earth and the moon.
One of the most interesting facts about the moon is that its surface
affords evidence of a cataclysm which has wiped out many, and perhaps
nearly all, of the records of its earlier history, that were once
written upon its face. Even on the earth there have been geological
catastrophes destroying or burying the accumulated results of ages of
undisturbed progress, but on the moon these effects have been
transcendent. The story of the tremendous disaster that overtook the
moon is partly written in its giant volcanoes.
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