The intensity of reflected light is very small, when compared with that which proceeds directly from luminous bodies. M. Bouguer, a French philosopher, who made a variety of experiments to ascertain the proportion of light emitted by the heavenly bodies, concluded from these experiments, that the light transmitted from the sun to the earth is at least 300,000 times as great as that which descends to us from the full moon--and that, of 300,000 rays which the moon receives, from 170,000 to 200,000 are absorbed. Hence we find that, however brilliant the moon may appear at night--in the day time she appears as obscure as a small portion of dusky cloud to which she happens to be adjacent, and reflects no more light than a portion of whitish cloud of the same size. And as the full moon fills only the ninety thousandth part of the sky, it would require at least ninety thousand moons to produce as much light as we enjoy in the day-time under a cloudy sky. As the moon and the planets are rendered visible to us only by light reflected from their surfaces, so it is in the same way that the images of most of the objects around us are conveyed to our organs of vision. We behold all the objects which compose an extensive landscape,--the hills and vales, the woods and lawns, the lakes and rivers, and the habitations of man--in consequence of the capacity with which they are endued of sending forth reflected rays to the eye, from every point of their surfaces and in all directions. In connection with the reflection of light, the following curious observation may be stated. Baron Funk, visiting some silver mines in Sweden, observed, that, ‘in a clear day, it was as dark as pitch underground in the eye of a pit, at sixty or seventy fathoms deep; whereas, in a cloudy or rainy day, he could see to read even at 106 fathoms deep. Enquiring of the miners, he was informed that this is always the case; and reflecting upon it, he imagined it arose from this circumstance, that when the atmosphere is full of clouds, light is reflected from them into the pit in all directions, and that thereby a considerable proportion of the rays are reflected perpendicularly upon the earth: whereas when the atmosphere is clear, there are no opaque bodies to reflect the light in this manner, at least in a sufficient quantity; and rays from the sun himself can never fall perpendicularly in that country.’--The reason here assigned is, in all probability, the true cause of the phenomenon now described.