After these savants may be cited the selenographic reliefs of the German astronomer Julius Schmidt, the topographical works of Father Secchi, the magnificent sheets of the English amateur, Waren de la Rue, and lastly a map on orthographical projection of Messrs. Lecouturier and Chapuis, a fine model set up in 1860, of very correct design and clear outlines.

Such is the nomenclature of the different maps relating to the lunar world.  Barbicane possessed two, that of Messrs. Boeer and Moedler and that of Messrs. Chapuis and Lecouturier.  They were to make his work of observer easier.

They had excellent marine glasses specially constructed for this journey.  They magnified objects a hundred times; they would therefore have reduced the distance between the earth and the moon to less than 1,000 leagues.  But then at a distance which towards 3 a.m. did not exceed a hundred miles, and in a medium which no atmosphere obstructed, these instruments brought the lunar level to less than fifteen hundred metres.

CHAPTER XI.

IMAGINATION AND REALITY.

“Have you ever seen the moon?” a professor asked one of his pupils ironically.

“No, sir,” answered the pupil more ironically still, “but I have heard it spoken of.”

In one sense the jocose answer of the pupil might have been made by the immense majority of sublunary beings.  How many people there are who have heard the moon spoken of and have never seen it—­at least through a telescope!  How many even have never examined the map of their satellite!

Looking at a comprehensive selenographic map, one peculiarity strikes us at once.  In contrast to the geographical arrangements of the earth and Mars, the continents occupy the more southern hemisphere of the lunar globe.  These continents have not such clear and regular boundary-lines as those of South America, Africa, and the Indian Peninsula.  Their angular, capricious, and deeply-indented coasts are rich in gulfs and peninsulas.  They recall the confusion in the islands of the Sound, where the earth is excessively cut up.  If navigation has ever existed upon the surface of the moon it must have been exceedingly difficult and dangerous, and the Selenite mariners and hydrographers were greatly to be pitied, the former when they came upon these perilous coasts, the latter when they were marine surveying on the stormy banks.

It may also be noticed that upon the lunar spheroid the South Pole is much more continental than the North Pole.  On the latter there is only a slight strip of land capping it, separated from the other continents by vast seas. (When the word “seas” is used the vast plains probably covered by the sea formerly must be understood.) On the south the land covers nearly the whole hemisphere.  It is, therefore, possible that the Selenites have already planted their flag on one of their poles, whilst Franklin, Ross, Kane, Dumont d’Urville, and Lambert have been unable to reach this unknown point on the terrestrial globe.