The Rev. Timothy Harley, F.R.A.S., who writes Moon-Lore (Son- nenschein),
is endowed with a capacity for collecting, assimilating, and making the most of ont-ofthe.way knowledge. It is not quite in jocularity that he styles this volume "a contribution to light literature, and to the literature of light." Some of Mr. Harley's
jokes smell of the lamp, "others have a look" of the nursery, and with several most readers would in any cue have gladly dispensed. Mr. Harley might also have spared his readers a good deal of half-comic, half. serious hairsplitting—useful, perhaps, as a contribution to what Mrs. Carlyle termed " coterie-talk," but not otherwise—like this :—"Religion is a science, and science is a religion ; bat they are not identical. Philosophy ought to be pions, and piety ought to be philosophical ; but philosophy and piety are two quantities and qualities that may dwell apart, though happily they may also be found in one nature." But when the reader has become accustomed to, or learned to wink at, Mr. Harley's eccen- tricities in style, he will find this book very entertaining as a collec- tion of anecdotes, and other curious information, on moon-spots (in- cluding the Man in the Moon, the Woman in the Moon, the Hare in the Moon, and the Toad in the Moon), moon-worship, moon-superstitions, and moon-inhabitation. Mr. Harley's volume is, indeed, rather one to be dipped into at odd moments, like Barton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," or Isaac Dieraelf a books. Thus, folks who read while running may think it odd that the moon is mostly a male and not a female deity. Yet such is the case. The Arabs, the Romans, and the Germans represent the moon as a male. "In Slavonic," Sir George Cox says, "as in the Tectonic mythology, the moon is male." Also " among the Mb000bis of South America, the moon is a man and the sun his wife;" while "the Abbe of North America take the same view ; and we know that in Sausorit and in Hebrew the word for moon is mescaline." This is but a specimen of Mr. Harley's book, the delightful character of which is enhanced by its carious little illustrations.
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