At a rate twenty-eight times slower than upon earth, the shadows shorten till the sun attains his meridian height, and then, from the tropical region upon which we have in imagination stood, nothing is to be seen on any side, save towards the black sky, but dazzling light. The relief of afternoon shadow comes but tardily, and the darkness drags its slow length along the valleys and creeps sluggishly up the mountain-sides till, in a hundred hours or more, the time of sunset approaches. This phenomenon is but daybreak reversed, and is unaccompanied by any of the gorgeous sky tints that make the kindred event so enrapturing on earth. The sun declines towards the dark horizon without losing one jot of its brilliancy, and darts the full intensity of its heat upon all it shines on to the last. Its disc touches the horizon, and in half an hour dips half-way beneath it, its intrinsic brightness and colour remaining unchanged. The brief interval of twilight occurs, as in the morning, when only a small chord of the disc is visible, and the long shadows now sharpen as the area of light that casts them decreases. For a while the zodiacal light vies with the earth-moon high in the heavens in illuminating the scene; but in a few hours this solar appendage passes out of view, and our world becomes the queen of the lunar night. At this sunset time the earth, nearly in the zenith of us, will be at its half-illuminated phase, and even then it will shed more light than we receive upon the brightest of moonlight nights. As the night proceeds, the earth-phase will increase through the gibbous stages until at midnight it will be “full,” and our orb will be seen in its entire beauty. It will perform at least one of its twenty-four-hourly rotations during the time that it appears quite full, and the whole of its surface features will in that time pass before the lunar spectator’s eye. At times the northern pole will be turned towards our view, at times the southern; and its polar ice-caps will appear as bright white spots, marking its axis of rotation. If our lunar sojourn were prolonged we should observe the northern ice-cap creep downwards to lower latitudes (during our winter) and retreat again (during our summer); and this variation would be perceptible in a less degree at the southern pole, on account of the watery area surrounding it. The seas would appear (so far as can be inferred) of pale blue-green tint; the continents parti-coloured: and the tinted spots would vary with the changing terrestrial seasons, as these are indicated by the positions and magnitudes of the polar ice-caps. The permanent markings would be ever undergoing apparent modification by the variations of the white cloud-belts that encircle the terrestrial sphere. Of the nature of these variations meteorological science is not as yet in a position to speak: it would indeed be vastly to the benefit of that science if a view of