Astronomers, however, require somewhat better evidence. It might well be that a new crater-shaped depression should appear in the moon without any volcanic action having occurred. For reasons already adduced, indeed, I hold it to be to all intents and purposes certain that if a new depression is really in question at all, it is in reality only an old and formerly shallow crater, whose floor has broken up, yielding at length to the expansive and contractive effects above described, which would act with exceptional energy at this particular part of the moon's surface, close as it is to the lunar equator. But it is by no means clear that this part of the moon's surface has undergone any change whatever. We must not be misled by the very confident tone of selenographers. Of course they fully believe what they tell us: but they are strongly prejudiced. Their labours, as they well know, have now very little interest unless signs of change should be detected in the moon. Surveyors who have done exceedingly useful work in mapping a region would scarcely expect the public to take much interest in additional information about every rock or pebble existing in that region, unless they could show that something more than a mere record of rocks and pebbles was really involved. Thus selenographers have shown, since the days of Schroeter, an intense anxiety to prove that our moon deserves, in another than Juliet's sense, to be called "the inconstant moon." In another sense again they seem disposed to "swear by the inconstant moon," as changing yearly, if not "monthly, in her circled orb." Thus a very little evidence satisfies them, and they are very readily persuaded in their own mind that former researches of theirs, or of their fellow-pebble-counters, have been so close and exact, that craters must have been detected then which have been found subsequently to exist in the moon. I do not in the slightest degree question their _bona fides_, but a long experience of their ways leads me to place very little reliance on such stereotyped phrases as I have quoted above. Now, in my paper in the "Contemporary Review" on this particular crater, I called attention to the fact that in the magnificent photograph of the moon taken by Dr. Louis Rutherfurd on March 6, 1865 (note well the date) there is a small spot of lighter colour than the surrounding region, nearly in the place indicated in the imperfect drawing of Klein's record which alone was then available to me. For reasons, I did not then more closely describe this feature of the finest lunar photograph ever yet obtained.