With a fair telescope you can distinguish very readily her mountain chains, her isolated mountains, her circuses or ring formations, and her rills, cracks and radiating streaks.

The character of the whole lunar relief is comprised in these divisions.

It is a surface prodigiously reticulated, upheaved and depressed, apparently without the slightest order or system.

It is a vast Switzerland, an enormous Norway, where everything is the result of direct plutonic action.

This surface, so rugged, craggy and wrinkled, seems to be the result of successive contractions of the crust, at an early period of the planet's existence.