CLEFTS OR RILLS.—­Though Fontenelle, in his Entretiens sur la Pluralite des Mondes, informs his pupil, the Marchioness, that “M.  Cassini discovered in the moon something which separates, then reunites, and finally loses itself in a cavity, which from its appearance seemed to be a river,” it can hardly be supposed that what the French astronomer saw, or fancied he saw, with the imperfect telescopes of that day, was one of the remarkable and enigmatical furrows termed clefts or rills, first detected by the Hanoverian selenographer Schroter; who, on October 7, 1787, discovered the very curious serpentine cleft near Herodotus, having a few nights before noted for the first time the great Alpine valley west of Plato, once classed with the clefts, though it is an object of a very different kind.  Between 1787 and 1797 Schroter found ten rills; but twenty years elapsed before an addition was made to this number by the discoveries of Gruithuisen, and, a short time after, by those of Lohrmann, who in twelve months (1823-24) detected seventy.  Kinau, Madler, and finally Schmidt, followed, till, in 1866, when the latter published his work, Ueber Rillen auf dem Monde, the list was thus summarised:—­

In the 1st or N.W. quadrant 127 rills
In the 2nd or N.E. quadrant 75 rills
In the 3rd or S.E. quadrant 141 rills
In the 4th or S.W. quadrant 82 rills

or 425 in all.  Since the date of this book the number of known rills has been more than doubled; in fact, scarcely a lunation passes without new discoveries being made.

The significance of the word rille in German, a groove or furrow, describes with considerable accuracy the usual appearance of the objects to which it is applied, consisting as they do of long narrow channels, with sides more or less steep, and sometimes vertical.  They often extend for hundreds of miles in approximately straight lines over portions of the moon’s surface, frequently traversing in their course ridges, craters, and even more formidable obstacles, without any apparent check or interruption, though their ends are sometimes marked by a mound or crater.  Their length ranges from ten or twelve to three hundred miles or more (as in the great Sirsalis rill), their breadth, which is very variable within certain limits, from less than half a mile to more than two, and their depth (which must necessarily remain to a great extent problematical) from 100 to 400 yards.  They exhibit in the telescope a gradation from somewhat coarse grooves, easily visible at suitable times in very moderately sized instruments, to striae so delicate as to require the largest and most perfect optical means and the best atmospheric conditions to be glimpsed at all.  Viewed under moderate amplification, the majority of rills resemble deep canal-like channels with roughly parallel sides, displaying occasionally local irregularities, and fining off to invisibility at one or both ends.  But,