upon rare occasions is the lunar scenery suffused with coloured illumination, and these are when, as we shall presently have to describe, the solar rays reach the moon after traversing the earth’s atmosphere during an eclipse of the sun. This atmosphere of ours is the most influential element in beautifying our terrestrial scenery, and the absence of such an appendage from the moon is the great modifying cause that affects lunar scenery as compared with that of the earth. We are accustomed to the sun with its dazzling brightness—overpowering though it be—subdued and softened by our vaporous screen. Upon the moon there is no such modification. The sun’s intrinsic brilliancy is undiminished, its apparent distance is shortened, and it gleams out in fierce splendour only to be realised, and then imperfectly, by the conception of a gigantic electric light a few feet from the eye. And the brightness is rendered the more striking by the blackness of the surrounding sky. Since there is no atmosphere there can be no sky-light, for there is nothing above the lunar world to diffuse the solar beams; not a trace of that moisture which even in our tropical skies scatters some of the sun’s light and gives a certain degree of opacity or blueness, deep though it be, to the heavens by day. Upon the moon, with no light-diffusing vapour, the sky must be as dark or even darker than that with which we are familiar upon the finest of moonless nights. And this blackness prevails in the full blaze of the lunar noon-day sun. If the eye (upon the moon) could bear to gaze upon the solar orb (which would be less possible than upon earth) or could it be screened from the direct beams, as doubtless it could by intervening objects, it would perceive the nebulous and other appendages which we know as the corona, the zodiacal light, and the red solar protuberances: or if these appendages could not be viewed with the sun above the horizon they would certainly be seen in glorious perfection when the luminary was about to rise or immediately after it had set.