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the naked sight,[1] while others of our hemisphere appeared more distant, and some I missed altogether; but the moon, full orbed, was by far the most striking object, appearing more than double her size with us, and her light, though borrowed, proportionally resplendent.
I shall not attempt to describe my astonishment at this sublime and hitherto super-human spectacle, because having been in all latitudes, and being, as I have already said, familiar with astronomy in its abstrusest branches, I was now fully convinced, not only that I was in no part of the world ever visited before, but that there was something else belonging to the world itself never even known or imagined. I am well aware that the figure and extent of our planet can neither be denied nor doubted; the moon, whilst I am writing, is just touching the sun's vertical disk within a second of calculated time, and moving onward to predicted eclipse; and in my voyage homewards, I saw the moon at
- ↑ I found afterwards that no parallax could be obtained by the largest telescopes.
the
