But though the ancients understood the character, temperament, and, in a
word, moral qualities of the moon from a mythological point of view, the
most learned amongst them remained very ignorant of selenography.

Several astronomers, however, of ancient times discovered certain
particulars now confirmed by science. Though the Arcadians pretended
they had inhabited the earth at an epoch before the moon existed, though
Simplicius believed her immovable and fastened to the crystal vault,
though Tacitus looked upon her as a fragment broken off from the solar
orbit, and Clearch, the disciple of Aristotle, made of her a polished
mirror upon which were reflected the images of the ocean--though, in
short, others only saw in her a mass of vapours exhaled by the earth, or
a globe half fire and half ice that turned on itself, other _savants_,
by means of wise observations and without optical instruments, suspected
most of the laws that govern the Queen of Night.

Thus Thales of Miletus, B.C. 460, gave out the opinion that the moon was
lighted up by the sun. Aristarchus of Samos gave the right explanation
of her phases. Cleomenus taught that she shone by reflected light.
Berose the Chaldean discovered that the duration of her movement of
rotation was equal to that of her movement of revolution, and he thus
explained why the moon always presented the same side. Lastly,
Hipparchus, 200 years before the Christian era, discovered some
inequalities in the apparent movements of the earth's satellite.

These different observations were afterwards confirmed, and other
astronomers profited by them. Ptolemy in the second century, and the
Arabian Aboul Wefa in the tenth, completed the remarks of Hipparchus on
the inequalities that the moon undergoes whilst following the undulating
line of its orbit under the action of the sun. Then Copernicus, in the