The Story of Earth

 The Moon, The Lamp of Night

 THE MOON, THE LAMP OF NIGHT For many millions of years past, certainly not less than fifty millions, the earth has been attended by a satellite which means attendant called the moon. Inflates men have admired the moon, and in the history of almost all nations there are records that the moon has actually been worshiped. It is, of course, the most brilliant body in the whole heavens, after the sun, so far as our view of things is concerned; and, just as the sun is the sun is the king of day, so the moon is the queen of night, and on account of her beauty has been celebrated by thousands of poets, The whiteness of the moon’s light has always been for poets and emblem of purity, thought this light, as we know, is not made by the moon, but is merely reflected sunlight.

 The time has gone when men thought that everything ins the world existed only for their use, nor do we now credit the moon with the power of causing lunacy, which really means moon@acy, But we know that the moon has very important influences upon the earth. The most obvious of these influences is the light which the moon sends us, which at night may sometimes be quite useful. We have already seen how little of the sun’s light the earth catches, and the moon, being smaller than the earth, catches much less. It has been reckoned that is world require 600,000 Full moons, all shining together, to light the earth as brilliantly as the sunlight it now.

 The sun is always shining, and the side of the moon which is exposed to it is always lit by it, except for a few minutes now and again, when the earth gets between the sun and the moon, The proof of the fact that the moon gives out no light of its own is to be found is the changes that the moon goes thorough every month. These changes, which we are all more or less familiar with, can, only have one meaning which is, that all the light we see the moon by is reflected sunlight; and if the sun’s light upon the moon I am slighting the half which is away from our eyes, then we see no moon at all.

The only exception to this is that sometimes we can see what people call “the old moon in the young moon’s arm.” We see, perhaps, a beautiful bright crescent, and then the rest of the moon very faintly shown. The bright crescent we see by reflected sunlight, and the rest of the moon’s face by reflected earthlight. This is one of the facts which prove that the earth, see from somewhere else, would look bright. It reflects sunlight enough, indeed, to light up the face of the moon at times sufficiently for us to see it by.

 The brightness of the moon depends on its nearness.

 Hailed by The New York Times for writing “with wonderful clarity about science. That effortlessly teaches as it zips along,” nationally bestselling author Robert M. Hazen offers a radical new approach to Earth history in this intertwined tale of the planet’s living and nonliving spheres. With an astrobiology's imagination, a historian’s perspective, and a naturalist’s eye, Haven calls upon twenty-first-century discoveries that have revolutionized geology and enabled scientists to envision Earth’s many iterations in vivid detail—from the mile-high lava tides of its infancy to the early organisms responsible for more than two-thirds of the mineral varieties beneath our feet. Lucid, controversial, and on the cutting edge of its field, The Story of Earth is popular science of the highest order.