truthfulness constitutes its only claim to be poetry, that the
moon was new at one o'clock in the morning of the day of the battle of
Corunna (16th January, 1809). The ballad evidently implies that the
funeral took place on the night following the battle. We are therefore
assured that the moon can hardly have been a day old when the hero was
consigned to his grave. But the moon in such a case is practically
invisible, and yields no appreciable moonbeams at all, misty or
otherwise. Indeed, if the funeral took place at the "dead of night," as
the poet asserts, then the moon must have been far below the horizon at
the time.[6]

In alluding to this and similar instances, Mr. Nasmyth gives a word of
advice to authors or to artists who desire to bring the moon on a scene
without knowing as a matter of fact that our satellite was actually
present. He recommends them to follow the example of Bottom in _A
Midsummer's Night's Dream_, and consult "a calendar, a calendar! Look in
the almanac; find out moonshine, find out moonshine!"

[Illustration: Fig. 23.--Comparative Sizes of the Earth and the Moon.]

Among the countless host of celestial bodies--the sun, the moon, the
planets, and the stars--our satellite enjoys one special claim on our
attention. The moon is our nearest permanent neighbour. It is just
possible that a comet may occasionally approach the earth more closely
than the moon but with this exception the other celestial bodies are all
many hundreds or thousands, or even many millions, of times further from
us than the moon.

It is also to be observed that the moon is one of the smallest visible
objects which the heavens contain. Every one of the thousands of stars
that can be seen with the unaided eye is enormously larger than our
satellite. The brilliance and apparent vast proportions of the moon
arise from the fact that it is only 240,000 miles away, which is a
distance almost immeasurably small when compared with the distances
between the earth and the stars.

Fig. 23 exhibits the relative sizes of the earth and its attendant. The
small globe shows the moon, while the larger globe represents the earth.
When we measure the actual diameters of the two globes, we find that of
the earth to be 7,918 miles and of the moon 2,160 miles, so that the
diameter of the earth is nearly four times greater than the diameter of
the moon. If the earth were cut into fifty pieces, all equally large,
then one of these pieces rolled