The great plains of the Mare Imbrium and the Mare Serenitatis (the
``Sea of Showers'' and the ``Sea of Serenity''), bordered in part by
lofty mountain ranges precisely like terrestrial mountains, scalloped
along their shores with beautiful bays curving back into the adjoining
highlands, and united by a great strait passing between the nearly
abutting ends of the ``Lunar Apennines'' and the ``Lunar Caucasus,''
offer the elements of a scene of world beauty such as it would be
difficult to match upon our planet. Look at the finely modulated
bottom of the ancient sea in Mr Ritchey's exquisite photograph of the
western part of the Mare Serenitatis, where one seems to see the play
of the watery currents heaping the ocean sands in waving lines, making
shallows, bars, and deeps for the mariner to avoid or seek, and
affording a playground for the creatures of the main. What geologist
would not wish to try his hammer on those rocks with their stony pages
of fossilized history? There is in us an instinct which forbids us to
think that there was never any life there. If we could visit the moon,
there is not among us a person so prosaic and unimaginative that he
would not, the very first thing, begin to search for traces of its
inhabitants. We would look for them in the deposits on the sea
bottoms; we would examine the shores wherever the configuration seemed
favorable for harbors and the sites of maritime cities -- forgetting
that it may be a little ridiculous to ascribe to the ancient lunarians
the same ideas that have governed the development of our race; we
would search through the valleys and along the seeming courses of
vanished streams; we would explore the mountains, not the terrible
craters, but the pinnacled chains that recall our own Alps and
Rockies; seeking everywhere some vestige of the transforming presence
of intelligent life.
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