The signs of age are on the moon. It seems pitted, torn, and rent by the past action of long-dead fires, till its surface is like a piece of porous cinder under the magnifying-glass,--a burnt-out cinder of a planet, which rolls through the void like a ruin of what has been; and, more significant still, this surface is wrinkled everywhere, till the analogy with an old and shrivelled face or hand or fruit (Figs. 73 and 75), where the puckered skin is folded about a shrunken centre, forces itself on our attention, and suggests a common cause,--a something underlying the analogy, and making it more than a mere resemblance. [Illustration: FIG. 75.--WITHERED APPLE.] The moon, then, is dead; and if it ever was the home of a race like ours, that race is dead too. I have said that our New Astronomy modifies our view of the moral universe as well as of the physical one; nor do we need a more pregnant instance than in this before us. In these days of decay of old creeds of the eternal, it has been sought to satisfy man’s yearning toward it by founding a new religion whose god is Humanity, and whose hope lies in the future existence of our own race, in whose collective being the individual who must die may fancy his aims and purpose perpetuated in an endless progress. But, alas for hopes looking to this alone! we are here brought to face the solemn thought that, like the individual, though at a little further date, Humanity itself may die! Before we leave this dead world, let us take a last glance at one of its fairest scenes,--that which we obtain when looking at a portion on which the sun is rising, as in this view of Gassendi (Fig. 76), in which the dark part on our right is still the body of the moon, on which the sun has not yet risen. Its nearly level rays stretch elsewhere over a surface that is, in places, of a strangely smooth texture, contrasting with the ruggedness of the ordinary soil, which is here gathered into low plaits, that, with the texture we have spoken of, look “Like marrowy crapes of China silk, Or wrinkled skin on scalded milk,” as they lie, soft and almost beautiful, in the growing light. Where its first beams are kindling, the summits cast their shadows illimitedly over the darkening plains away on the right, until they melt away into the night,--a night which is not utterly black, for even here a subdued radiance comes from the earth-shine of our own world in the sky. Let us leave here the desolation about us, happy that we can come back at will to that world, our own familiar dwelling, where the meadows are still green and the birds still sing, and where, better yet, still dwells our own kind,--surely the world, of all we have found in our wanderings, which we should ourselves have chosen to be our home. [Illustration: FIG. 76.--GASSENDI. NOV. 7, 1867.] VI. METEORS. What is truth? What is fact, and what is fancy, even with regard to solid visible things that we may see and handle?