Islands are numerous on the surface of the moon.  They are almost all oblong or circular, as though traced with a compass, and seem to form a vast archipelago, like that charming group lying between Greece and Asia Minor which mythology formerly animated with its most graceful legends.  Involuntarily the names of Naxos, Tenedos, Milo, and Carpathos come into the mind, and you seek the ship of Ulysses or the “clipper” of the Argonauts.  That was what it appeared to Michel Ardan; it was a Grecian Archipelago that he saw on the map.  In the eyes of his less imaginative companions the aspect of these shores recalled rather the cut-up lands of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia; and where the Frenchman looked for traces of the heroes of fable, these Americans were noting favourable points for the establishment of mercantile houses in the interest of lunar commerce and industry.

Some remarks on the orographical disposition of the moon must conclude the description of its continents, chains of mountains, isolated mountains, amphitheatres, and watercourses.  The moon is like an immense Switzerland—­a continual Norway, where Plutonic influence has done everything.  This surface, so profoundly rugged, is the result of the successive contractions of the crust while the orb was being formed.  The lunar disc is propitious for the study of great geological phenomena.  According to the remarks of some astronomers, its surface, although more ancient than the surface of the earth, has remained newer.  There there is no water to deteriorate the primitive relief, the continuous action of which produces a sort of general levelling.  No air, the decomposing influence of which modifies orographical profiles.  There Pluto’s work, unaltered by Neptune’s, is in all its native purity.  It is the earth as she was before tides and currents covered her with layers of soil.

After having wandered over these vast continents the eye is attracted by still vaster seas.  Not only does their formation, situation, and aspect recall the terrestrial oceans, but, as upon earth, these seas occupy the largest part of the globe.  And yet these are not liquid tracts, but plains, the nature of which the travellers hoped soon to determine.

Astronomers, it must be owned, have decorated these pretended seas with at least odd names which science has respected at present.  Michel Ardan was right when he compared this map to a “map of tenderness,” drawn up by Scudery or Cyrano de Bergerac.

“Only,” added he, “it is no longer the map of sentiment like that of the 18th century; it is the map of life, clearly divided into two parts, the one feminine, the other masculine.  To the women, the right hemisphere; to the men, the left!”

When he spoke thus Michel made his prosaic companions shrug their shoulders.  Barbicane and Nicholl looked at the lunar map from another point of view to that of their imaginative friend.  However, their imaginative friend had some reason on his side.  Judge if he had not.