Yet notwithstanding the evidence which we have just been considering
in support of the hypothesis that the ``seas'' are lava floods,
Messrs. Loewy and Puiseux, the selenographers of the Paris
Observatory, are convinced that these great plains bear characteristic
marks of the former presence of immense bodies of water. In that case
we should be forced to conclude that the later oceans of the moon lay
upon vast sheets of solidified lava; and thus the catastrophe of the
lunar world assumes a double aspect, the earliest oceans being
swallowed up in molten floods issuing from the interior, while the
lands were reduced to chaos by a universal eruption of tremendous
volcanoes; and then a period of comparative quiet followed, during
which new seas were formed, and new life perhaps began to flourish in
the lunar world, only to end in another cataclysm, which finally put a
term to the existence of the moon as a life-supporting world.
Suppose we examine two more of Mr Ritchey's illuminating photographs,
and, first, the one showing the crater Theophilus and its
surroundings. We have spoken of Theophilus before, citing the facts
that it is sixty-four miles in diameter and eighteen thousand feet
deep. It will be noticed that it has two brother giants -- Cyrillus
the nearer, and Catharina the more distant; but Theophilus is plainly
the youngest of the trio.
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