are classic; and we have all in our childhood recited or at least read The Burial of Sir John Moore with the line
"By the struggling moonbeam's misty light."
Some critic was unkind enough to look up the almanac and he found "that the Moon was new on the 16th of January, 1809, at one o'clock in the morning of the day of the battle of Corunna." The Moon was therefore invisible on the following day and since the burial took place on the night after the battle it was, in any event, below the horizon.
It would be easy to cite many other passages in which similar errors occur. Nor are these mistakes confined to writers in our own language. William Lyon Phelps, for instance, in his Essays on Modern Novelists, says that "the Moon, in German fiction, is not astronomical, but decorative. I have read some stories in which it seems to rise on almost every page and is invariably full. Even Herr Sudermann places in Es War a young crescent Moon in the eastern sky!"
Our modern civilization and our educational system are to a large extent responsible for this general ignorance of the apparent motions of the most familiar of all the objects in the night sky. Astronomy, in our country at least, is seldom taught in the schools and generally only as an elective in our colleges, and boys and girls can pass thru all the grades to a university degree without acquiring the slightest information about the Sun, the Moon, the planets or the stars. And our crowded hurrying life with its insistent and ever growing demands upon our time affords ever less leisure for quiet observation and thought, and city lights too often hide from us the lights in the sky. That is why I am devoting the first part of this lecture to a simple account of the Moon as we see it in the sky.
It requires no observatory equipment—not even the smallest telescope—to gain a knowledge of the apparent motions of the Moon in the sky. It is only necessary to watch it with seeing eyes, as the ancients did thousands of years before the telescope was invented. Any intelligent boy or girl can repeat these observations and verify what I am going to say, and I hope that many of you who hear me tonight will do so. When it comes to the real motion of the Moon the story is very different. To trace this motion in detail, to analyze it, and explain it on the Newtonian theory of gravitation forms one of the most intricate and diffi-
