within that of our canvass. Nothing that we had hitherto seen more highly excited our astonishment. Believe it or believe it not, it was one entire crystallization!—its edge, throughout its whole length of 340 miles, is an acute angle of solid quartz crystal, brilliant as a piece of Derbyshire spar just brought from a mine, and containing scarcely a fracture or a chasm from end to end! What a prodigious influence must our thirteen times larger globe have exercised upon this satellite, when an embryo in the womb of time, the passive subject of chemical affinity! We found that wonder and astonishment, as excited by objects in this distant world, were but modes and attributes of ignorance, which should give place to elevated expectations, and to reverential confidence in the illimitable power of the Creator.
"The dark expanse of waters to the south of the first great ocean has often been considered a fourth; but we found it to be merely a sea of the first class, entirely surrounded by land, and much more encumbered with promontories and islands than it has been exhibited in any lunar chart. One of its promontories runs from the vicinity of Pitatus (No. 19), in a slightly carved and very narrow line, to Bullialdns (No. 22), which is merely a circular head to it, 264 miles from its starting place. This is another mountainous ring, & marine volcano, nearly burnt out, and slumbering upon its cinders. But Pitatus, standing upon a bold cape of the southern shore, is apparently exulting in the might and majesty of its tires. The atmosphere being now quite free from vapor, we introduced the magnifiers to examine a large bright circle of bills which sweep close beside the western abutments of this flaming mountain. The hills were either of snow-white marble or semi-transparent crystal, we could not distinguish which, and they bounded another of those lovely green valleys, which, however monotonous in my descriptions, are of paradisaical beauty and fertility, and like primitive Eden in the bliss of their inhabitants. Dr. Herschel here again predicated another of his sagacious theories. He said the proximity of the flaming mountain, Bullialdus, must be so great a local convenience to dwellers in this valley during the long periodical absence of
