PUZZLING QUESTIONS.
It was not until the Projectile had passed a little beyond _Tycho's_
immense concavity that Barbican and his friends had a good opportunity
for observing the brilliant streaks sent so wonderfully flying in all
directions from this celebrated mountain as a common centre. They
examined them for some time with the closest attention.
What could be the nature of this radiating aureola? By what geological
phenomena could this blazing coma have been possibly produced? Such
questions were the most natural things in the world for Barbican and his
companions to propound to themselves, as indeed they have been to every
astronomer from the beginning of time, and probably will be to the end.
What _did_ they see? What you can see, what anybody can see on a clear
night when the Moon is full--only our friends had all the advantages of
a closer view. From _Tycho_, as a focus, radiated in all directions, as
from the head of a peeled orange, more than a hundred luminous streaks
or channels, edges raised, middle depressed--or perhaps _vice versa_,
owing to an optical illusion--some at least twelve miles wide, some
fully thirty. In certain directions they ran for a distance of at least
six hundred miles, and seemed--especially towards the west, northwest,
and north--to cover half the southern hemisphere.
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