Selenographers are not quite agreed as to the nature of these
colors. Not that such colors are without variety or too faint to be
easily distinguished. Schmidt of Athens even says that if our oceans on
earth were all evaporated, an observer in the Moon would hardly find the
seas and continents of our globe even so well outlined as those of the
Moon are to the eye of a terrestrial observer. According to him, the
shade of color distinguishing those vast plains known as "seas" is a
dark gray dashed with green and brown,--a color presented also by a few
of the great craters.
This opinion of Schmidt's, shared by Beer and Maedler, Barbican's
observations now convinced him to be far better founded than that of
certain astronomers who admit of no color at all being visible on the
Moon's surface but gray. In certain spots the greenish tint was quite
decided, particularly in _Mare Serenitatis_ and _Mare Humorum,_ the very
localities where Schmidt had most noticed it. Barbican also remarked
that several large craters, of the class that had no interior cones,
reflected a kind of bluish tinge, somewhat like that given forth by a
freshly polished steel plate. These tints, he now saw enough to convince
him, proceeded really from the lunar surface, and were not due, as
certain astronomers asserted, either to the imperfections of the
spy-glasses, or to the interference of the terrestrial atmosphere.
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