MOTHER EARTH. NO. IV.-HER NEAREST RELATIVES. (Continued from page 120.) Her little, only daughter, the Moon.-If Mother Earth was ever a piece of the sun there is nearly as much reason to think the moon derives her being from the earth; so I call her a daughter. Most constant is her attendance upon her mother, and great has been the praise bestowed upon her by heathen worshippers and by poets, who address her as a goddess by the names Cynthia, Diana, Selena, or Luna. As Luna or Lucina she was the goddess of light; as Diana she was the patroness of the chase, and delighted in hunting. In "Cynthia's revels" Ben Jonson addresses her : "Queen and huntress, chaste and fair, State in wonted manner keep. Hesperus desires thy light, Goddess excellently bright." The dark spots on the moon's face must have been noticed from the first; for they are always there, and the same face is always turned towards us. Uninstructed people, fancying them to resemble a man's face, talk of the man in the moon; poets have said it is the boy Endymion, whose company Diana loves so well; Albertus sees there the figure of a lion, with his tail towards the east; and some are in favour of a fox. The truth is, you may see in the moon what you please if you have a strong fancy. Some thought that when God had at first created too much earth to make a perfect globe, not knowing well where to bestow the rest, he placed it in the moon, which ever since has so darkened it in some parts. The Stoics considered the moon to be a mixture of fire and air, and in their opinion the variety of composition accounted for its spots. It was very common, before the telescope had shown us spots on the sun and belts on the planets, to suppose that all the stars, the planets, and the sun were pure and perfect, and that the moon alone was a little dirty through her nearness to this gross, dark Earth. Aristotle had thought the spots to be the reflected images of the seas and lands of the Earth; but when the telescope had shown that the moon's surface was unequal, they were thought to be real seas and lands. One spot was named the Caspian Sea, and another the Black Lake. Great was the opposition offered to Galileo and his telescopes by people who thought the moon ought to be quite smooth in order to be perfect. Galileo took delight, they said, in ruining the fairest works of nature. But Galileo replied, that the earth is all the more perfect and better fitted to live in through its being rough, with mountains, plains, and rivers; and if it were smooth what else would it be, he asks, but a vast, unblessed desert; void of animals, of plants, of cities, and of men; the abode of silence and inaction; senseless, lifeless, soulless, and stripped of all those ornaments which make it now so various and so beautiful ? In the Middle Ages there lived in the monasteries some theologians who were very learned, but wasted much of their time on fruitless questions about paradise and the angels. With some of these it was an opinion that paradise was in the moon: there they supposed the body of Enoch was kept; there the souls of all good people were reserved till the day of judgment; there it was that Paul found himself when he was wrapt into the third heaven; and thither went the thief who received the promise on the cross. So far we have been a good deal occupied with fancies; but men of vast talent and sound sense have examined the moon, and through being so near have learnt many things about her. Her distance from us is only 240,000 miles; her diameter, or measurement by a wire passing from one side to the other through her centre, is 2,000 miles. Her surface appears to be a complete wreck of mountains, gullies, ridges, gorges, abysses, and craters. Some of the mountain chains are as high as the Alps, the Andes, or the Himalaya, and many of the volcanic craters are 50 or 100 miles across. No trace of water or other liquid is to be seen, the dark parts once thought to be seas being only the shadows of the mountains. No atmosphere can be detected, and the absence of air would make it impossible that the sun's light should be diffused; for we on earth should see nothing but a terrible glare where the sun was darting his rays direct, and darkness everywhere else, were it not that our atmosphere spreads out, or diffuses the beams, and gives us the gentle brightness called daylight. From these circumstances many suppose the moon cannot be the seat of life and beauty. Yet, still our satellite has many and important uses. Although it would take 300,000 full moons to give us daylight, yet the rays she receives from the sun and reflects to us, reaching us, as they do generally, in the night, are most welcome to the traveller. In the autumn, again, about harvest-time, the moon rises night after night about the hour the sun goes down, and enables the farmer to get in the grain. By its attractive power on the earth and its waters it occasions the tides, keeping the ocean in a constant stir, and helping to preserve its purity. By its constant changes, going through all its phases, from new moon to full and from full moon to new, thirteen times in the year, it helps us to divide our time into months (moonths). Many people speak of the coldness of her light, and farmers have charged her with bringing the frost; but in reality she sends us a little heatso very little, however, that the most delicate instruments can barely detect it-and the frost comes when the moon is brightest because the sky is then clearest, and allows the heat of the earth to escape into space. As to her having anything else to do with the weather, the opinion is very common, but seems to have no certain foundation. True, it often rains when the moon changes; but so it does when the moon does not change. I have said so much about the moon because, being so near to us and so conspicuous an object in the heavens, she deserves it. Besides, there are so many moons belonging to the various planets, and much that I have said of ours is true of them. They are all small compared to the planet they revolve round; they all keep always the same face toward their parent planet; they all receive light from the sun, and throw it on to the planets when they would otherwise be dark. The remains of her Brother that met with an Accident.-I mentioned before that Neptune was not seen till a few years ago, and he would have been undiscovered until now had we been without telescopes. He is by no means small in size, but he is very far off, and all things look smaller and smaller the farther they are away, until they pass out of view altogether. The smaller they are in themselves, the less distant need they be to become invisible. If, then, there are bodies moving round the sun nearer to him than Neptune is, but a good deal smaller, they may escape our notice; and it really seems likely that this is the case. Hardly a year passes without the fall of what are called meteoric stones; they have been seen to fall, and have been picked up and preserved. There's a large one in the British Museum-no boy could lift it, no, nor man either; "and if it be considered," says Mrs. Somerville, "that only a small part of the earth is inhabited, it may be presumed that numbers fall into the ocean or on the uninhabited part of the land unseen by man." They are often very large; it is said that several have been greater than the planet Ceres, which is about 70 miles in diameter. One which passed within 25 miles of us, weighed, it was supposed, about 600,000 tons, and moved about 20 miles in a second-only a piece of it fell to the earth. Possibly there has been some mistake about the size of such bodies, for their great brilliancy when passing through our atmosphere is apt to dazzle and deceive the eye; but they have been found of every size, from that of a few grains to the weight of some tons, and these, perhaps, were only the fragments of a larger aerolith which burst in the air. A mass was found in Brazil during the present century weighing more than six tons. Dr. Prout considers it as proved from many observations that these aerolites, while in the higher regions of the atmosphere, are often in a state of intense ignition. They there assume the form of brilliant meteors, which, as they approach the earth, burst with a loud explosion, followed by a shower of stones. These stones generally show plain marks of having been melted; and many of them have been picked up while still warm, so as to leave no doubt of their being real aerolites. It is singular, too, that these "stones," as they are called, always contain either iron, or cobalt, or nickel, or all these three metals in union with various earthy substances, such as silica, magnesia, and lime. Ross, in his expedition to the Arctic regions, mentions that the Esquimaux had knives made of meteoric iron; and Mr. Sowerby once presented to Alexander I., Emperor of Russia, a sword of the same materials. Shooting stars and meteors sometimes burst from the clear azure sky, and darting along the heavens are extinguished without noise and without any fall of stones-a vapour-like smoke being all they leave behind. In America astonishing multitudes of shooting stars and fire-balls have sometimes appeared. On the morning of the 12th of November, 1799, thousands of shooting stars, mixed with large meteors, illuminated the heavens for many hours over the whole continent, from Brazil to Labrador; it extended to Greenland and even Germany. Meteoric showers were seen off the coast of Spain, and in the Ohio country, on the morning of the 13th of November, 1831; and during many hours on the morning of the 13th of November, 1832, prodigious multitudes of shooting stars and meteors fell at Mocha on the Red Sea, in the Atlantic, in Switzerland, and at many places in England. But by much the most splendid meteoric shower on record, began at 9 o'clock in the evening of the 12th of November, 1833, and lasted till sunrise next morning. It extended from Niagara and the northern lakes of America to the south of Jamaica, and from the Atlantic Ocean to central Mexico. Shooting stars and meteors, of the apparent size of Jupiter, Venus, and even the full moon, darted in myriads toward the horizon, as if every star in the heavens had started from their spheres. They are described as having been frequent as flakes of snow in a snow-storm, and to have been seen with equal brilliancy over the greater part of the continent of North America. Now the question is, Where do these things come from? in what relationship do they stand to Mother Earth? At one time it was answered-They are the production of our own planet: Mother Earth shoots them up out of her volcanoes, and what goes up must come down again; or earthy powders and metallic powders, shot up from burning mountains, meet together and stick together and come down in a lump. This explanation wouldn't do; for these stones fall when there are no great vocanic eruptions going on, and they bury themselves so deeply in the earth that they must have fallen from a greater height than any volcano could send them to; and they have been found thousands of miles from any volcano; and they come in such directions and at such regular intervals, that Vesuvius, Hecla, and Etna, really cannot claim the honour of sending them. Then it was said they came from the moon. The poor moon, so many things are said to come from her, so many things are said to go to her, so many charges are laid at her innocent door. On the body of the moon there are so many basin-like depressions, like the craters of our own volcanoes, that there is no doubt the moon either is or has been the theatre of great disturbances. Some say she is so still, and that on the dark part of her surface they have seen bright spots, which they consider to be the light from burning mountains. These volcanoes, then, it has been said, shoot out the masses which reach us as aerolites; it would only be necessary that they should start with a velocity about four times that of a ball when first discharged from a cannon, and they would never fall back to the moon, but come within the attractive power of the earth. This theory is now pretty well given up, and it seems likely that in one part of our solar system, perhaps about 60 or 70 million of miles from the sun, there is a large group of these bodies always revolving, just as the planets do; and the earth in her journey comes near them twice a year, so near as to pull down the stragglers to herself. If you get two hoops to represent two orbits, and lay one across the other, you will see that they touch in two places and thus you will understand how the earth meets the main body of these stones twice in her annual journey. I told you before that Juno, Vesta, Ceres, and Pallas, with about 70 others, are thought by some to be the fragments of a planet that has been shattered. This supposed planet has received the name of Pluto. If there was such a planet as Pluto, and a comet struck against him, what would occur, do you think? Most likely no harm at all, for comets are thin, airy creatures, incapable of doing mischief. In 1861, Mother Earth passed through a comet's tail, and we none of us knew it till afterwards. If another planet struck Pluto, the case would be more serious; but there could hardly have been a chance of that, for the orbits of the planets lie one within the other, like a small hoop within a larger one, and a smaller still within that, so that there can be no interference or colJision. It has been thought, however, that Pluto may have had a great ocean of fire within himself, like that which the earth contains, and which supplies the fires of her volcanoes and the gases of her earthquakes; and this ocean, instead of contenting itself with a slight outbreak here and there, may have grown furious, and split the planet into a thousand splinters. If an accident of this kind occured once, it might occur again; if Juno and Vesta were formed in this way, the aerolites may have a similar origin; and in that case their orbit might be an exception to the rule, and lie across the earth's orbit. As these aerolites, then, appear to be either little planets, or the remains of a large one that has met with an accident, I have brought them into the family, and described them as Mother Earth's relatives. The theories of their origin are imagined and talked about; but mind, boys! we are not certain of their truth as yet, and I wish you always to make a distinction between what we know is true, and what we fancy may be. As the planets are sisters to Mother Earth and resemble her in so many particulars, it becomes a question whether they are inhabited or not. Orpheus, one of the most ancient Greek poets, thought the moon to have cities and houses in it. Of the same opinion were Anaxagoras, Democritus, Heraclides, and Xenophanes. The Pythagoreans thought all plants and animals in the moon would be 15 times larger than ours, because the days there are 15 times longer than ours. In more modern times Cardinal Cusanus held a particular world in every star, but Athanasius Kircher, in his book called "Ecstatick Journey," supposes himself carried by an angel through all the heavenly spaces and round the stars, and tells us that God has made nothing in the planets, no not so much as herbs, which has either life or sense in it. The ingenious Frenchman, Fontenelle, published a book on the "Plurality of Worlds," written in the form of pleasant conversations with a marchioness. In this he sets forth that the earth is a planet, the moon a habitable world, and the fixed stars so many suns, every one of which gives light to worlds like ours. In the 17th century Christianus Huygens, a famous Dutch astronomer, wrote a book called "The Celestial Worlds Discovered; or, Conjectures concerning the Inhabitants, Plants, and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets." In this book he gives reasons for thinking that the planets possess animals and plants not much different from ours, and if not water, yet liquids of another sort; that some of the animals are rational, with senses like ours, and pleasures to enjoy. The people there, he thinks, study astronomy, optics, and other sciences; live in society, build cities, navigate seas, enjoy music, and conduct their affairs pretty much as we do. It is curious, indeed, to think of their astronomy. The heavens would look different to the inhabitants of each planet; in Mercury the sun would appear three times larger than it does to us, Venus would be sometimes seven times larger and brighter, and almost serve them for a moon, while the earth would appear as a shining planet. If our own moon were inhabited, the people would never have the beauty of the heavens obscured by clouds; the night would be 328 hours long, and all this time the stars and planets would shine with great splendour; the earth would appear as a moon, 14 times larger than the moon appears to us, and the people on that half the moon which is turned towards us would be nicely lighted up, while those on the other half would never see the earth light at all. In the same century as Fontenelle's volume, appeared a book by Bishop Wilkins, called "A Discovery of a New World; or, a Discourse tending to prove that 'tis probable there may be another habitable World in the Moon." In this book, besides much else that is ingenious and curious, the bishop states it as a possible thing that some of our posterity will find a conveyance to this other world, and if there be inhabitants there, will have commerce with them. This he thinks men may be able to do by learning to apply wings to their body and fly, or by riding on the back of the great Ruck of Madagascar, mentioned by Marcus Polus, the Venetian traveller, as being a creature whose wings are twelve feet long, and who can take up a horse and his rider, or an elephant, as our kites do a mouse; or by means of a flying chariot, in which a man may sit and give such a motion as shall convey him through the air. This seems an anticipation of ballooning; but balloons could never reach the moon, and even if they could, it seems unlikely any inhabitants would be found in a planet where there is neither water to drink nor air to breathe. As to the planets themselves, the earth's true sisters, they have air and water, they have rain and snow, summer and winter; and some of the most learned philosophers of our own day are of opinion that in them the rain descends, the flowers bloom and the rivers flow, not in vain, but for the benefit of beings similar to ourselves. G. STUART. S. d. bad, એવી એટલ ABOUT WOLVES. WE rustled through the leaves like wind, AWOLF hunt is an exciting business, more especially so when the wolves are the hunters and man is the prey. We hear and see little of wolves in England out of menageries, but in southern France they are common, and uncommon ugly customers. Lately, wolf-hunting has been entered into very vigorously, all the sporting world of Paris at the meet, and English hounds that "would kill anything" chasing and bringing down the wolf with a dash and an enterprise that won universal admiration; and, indeed, if we said country appears to have swarmed with wolves. Shakspeare, in his play of "Henry the Fourth," alludes to the fact when he says O, thou wilt be a wilderness again, At the time when the English throne was occupied by princes of the Saxon race, the evil was strongly felt in England, as well as in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Indeed, so numerous were wolves in Yorkshire, that a place of retreat was erected at Flixton, to enable travellers to escape from their fangs. At length, in the reign of King Edgar, the nuisance became so intolerable that strong measures were resolved upon. The king hunted the wolf with great ardour, and instead of an annual tribute in money, which had been paid to his predecessors by the princes of Wales, he demanded a certain number of wolves' heads yearly. The measure taken by Edgar proved, in some degree, effectual. For several years many hundreds of wolves' heads were brought to the king; and such havoc was wrought among the ravenous animals that their numbers were greatly diminished. Still the breed was not exterminated. Long after the Conquest, indeed, the yellow wolf infested the sheepfolds, and barons were granted large tracts of land on condition of cutting off the prowling marauders. William the Conqueror granted Redesdale to Robert de Umfraville, ancestor of the Earls of Angus, on condition of his defending the district against wolves and enemies; and King John granted a licence to another baron to hunt the wolf in Devonshire. Even when the reign of Edward I. commenced, wolves existed in great numbers in various parts of England, and the counties of Worcester, Gloucester, Hereford, and others were so exposed to their ravages that the inhabitants felt quite insecure. The king, however, after putting down the oligarchs and demagogues of his generation, turned his attention to wolves, and issued a commission to Peter Corbet to destroy them by aid "of men, dogs, and engines, in all ways in which it shall seem expedient." This enterprise, like most of those undertaken for the public good, under the eye of "the English Justinian," appears to have been successful. Still wolves continued to prowl about England as late as the time of Queen Elizabeth, and at that time they were common in Scotland and swarming in Ireland. It was not till 1680, near the close of the reign of Charles II., that the last wolf was killed north of the Tweed; and it was not till 1711, during the reign of Queen Anne, that wolves disappeared from the county of Cork. THE BLACK WOLF OF WURTEMBURG. At the opening of the 18th century, the Duke of Wurtemburg ranked high among the princes of Germany. This duke, if famous for nothing else, would have been celebrated for his fine dogs and horses, the portraits of which he had taken and hung in his picturegallery, in the palace of Ludwigsburg. Among the animals in which he took delight was a black wolf, named Melac, which was long kept about the court. Melac was wonderfully faithful to the duke, following him wherever he went during the day, and sleeping at the foot of his bed at night. It appears, however, that, though friendly and faithful to the duke, the wolf could be sly and malicious to inferior personages, and that he did not much relish the company of strangers. nel Forstener, took some liberties with the One of the duke's officers, Lieutenant-Colo treatment, and resolved to give the colonel a lesson. Seizing the opportunity, therefore, when the gallant officer was engaged in earnest black wolf crept forward and gave the colonel conversation with some of his comrades, the so terrible a bite on the back, that he sprang up with a shriek of pain. favourite wolf. Melac did not relish such temburg undertook a campaign on the Rhine, On one occasion, when the Duke of Wurthe black wolf accompanied the army. The campaign, however, proved long, and the weather became so cold, that Melac grew weary and uncomfortable. Without ceremony door of the duke's chamber at Ludwigsburg. he deserted the camp, and appeared at the But how he found his way, or how he crossed the Rhine, remained a mystery. Charles the Sixth was crowned at Frankfort On another occasion, when the Emperor in 1711, the Duke of Wurtemburg carried Melac thither. At first he seemed to enjoy himself. Not relishing the firing of so many guns, however, he in a few days took an unceremonious leave of the imperial court, and soon presented himself at Ludwigsburg. CUVIER'S WOLF. Cuvier gives a most interesting account of a tame wolf which was confined in the menagerie at Paris. It had been given to the naturalist when quite a cub, and had been brought up with all the gentleness possible. As it grew older, it displayed the greatest attachment for its master, and would come when it was called, and leap and play about his person with all the fondness and security of a lap-dog. When full-grown, Cuvier presented the animal to the menagerie, and did not see it again for many years. At first the poor brute was quite disconsolate, would not take any food, and became fierce and angry with his keepers; but, in course of time, he became attached to those about him, and seemed to have transferred his affections from his old master to his new ones. After a lapse of several years, however, the naturalist_returned, and visited his old favourite. The wolf heard his voice amid the crowd in the gardens, and rushed frantically to the bars of its cell. Its master came and set it at liberty, and its joy was unbounded. It licked his face, put its paws upon his shoulders, rushed hither and thither in all the gladness of affection, and would not be put back again into its cell. Again the master left it, and again returned. The wolf recognized him immediately, and displayed the most frantic and touching pleasure. Once more its master left it, but the poor wolf could not bear the desertion. It |