Identifier: adolfostahllectu00astruoft (find matches)
Title: The Adolfo Stahl lectures in astronomy, delivered in San Francisco, California, in 1916-17 and 1917-18, under the auspices of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Year: 1919 (1910s)
Authors: Astronomical Society of the Pacific Aitken, Robert Grant, 1864-1951
Subjects: Astronomy
Publisher: San Francisco Stanford University Press
Contributing Library: Gerstein - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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explana-tion, or both, were unequal to the occasion, for when I hadfinished, the visitor replied with great dignity, Well! That isthe way it may do here, but in Humboldt County the new Moonalways rises in the west! That any one should be so ignorant concerning the motionsof the Moon, is certainly hard to credit; but my visitor differsonly in degree from many a famous poet and novelist. I couldquote a description of a sunset in a story written by one of theforemost realist fiction writers of New England, and pub-lished a few years ago in Harpers Monthly Magazine, in whicha crescent Moon in the eastern sky adds to the beauty of thescene; or a passage from a novel which was a best seller notso very long ago and whose author had a reputation as ascientific man, in which the full Moon rises at midnight.Indeed all kinds of liberties have been taken with the Moon.Coleridges lines in The Ancient Mariner, ^Delivered February 9, 1917.
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PLATE XVI. The Moon, 9d. 2.5h. Old. Photinjraph taken iviih the 2,6-ineh refractor, Oct. 11. 1891, by E. S.Holdcii and II. ff. Cainphcll. The Moon 17 The horned Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tipare classic; and we have all in our childhood recited or at leastread The Burial of Sir John Moore with the line By the struggling moonbeams misty Hght. Some critic was unkind enough to look up the almanac and hefound that the Moon was new on the 16th of January, 1809, atone oclock in the morning of the day of the battle of Corunna.The Moon was therefore invisible on the following day, andsince 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 whichsimilar errors occur. Nor are these mistakes confined towriters in our own language. William Lyon Phelps, forinstance, in his .Essays on Modem Novelists, says that theMoon, in German fiction, is not astronomical, but decorative. Ihave read some s

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