Another consequence of the small gravitative power of the moon bears upon the all-important question of atmosphere.  According to the theory of Dr. Johnstone Stoney, heretofore referred to, oxygen, nitrogen, and water vapor would all gradually escape from the moon, if originally placed upon it, because, by the kinetic theory, the maximum velocities of their molecules are greater than a mile and a half per second.  The escape would not occur instantly, nor all at once, for it would be only the molecules at the upper surface of the atmosphere which were moving with their greatest velocity, and in a direction radial to the center of the moon, that would get away; but in the course of time this gradual leakage would result in the escape of all of those gases.[16]

[Footnote 16:  The discovery of free hydrogen in the earth’s atmosphere, by Professor Dewar, 1901, bears upon the theory of the escape of gases from a planet, and may modify the view above expressed.  Since hydrogen is theoretically incapable of being permanently retained in the free state by the earth, its presence in the atmosphere indicates either that there is an influx from space or that it emanates from the earth’s crust.  In a similar way it may be assumed that atmospheric gases can be given off from the crust of the moon, thus, to a greater or less extent, supplying the place of the molecules that escape.]

After it had been found that, to ordinary tests, the moon offered no evidence of the possession of an atmosphere, and before Dr. Stoney’s theory was broached, it was supposed by many that the moon had lost its original supply of air by absorption into its interior.  The oxygen was supposed to have entered into combination with the cooling rocks and minerals, thus being withdrawn from the atmosphere, and the nitrogen was imagined to have disappeared also within the lunar crust.  For it seems to have always been tacitly assumed that the phenomenon to be accounted for was not so much the absence of a lunar atmosphere as its disappearance.  But disappearance, of course, implies previous existence.  In like manner it has always been a commonly accepted view that the moon probably once had enough water to form lakes and seas.

These, it has been calculated, could have been absorbed into the lunar globe as it cooled off.  But Johnstone Stoney’s theory offers another method by which they could have escaped, through evaporation and the gradual flight of the molecules into open space.  Possibly both methods have been in operation, a portion of the constituents of the former atmosphere and oceans having entered into chemical combinations in the lunar crust, and the remainder having vanished in consequence of the lack of sufficient gravitative force to retain them.

But why, it may be asked, should it be assumed that the moon ever had things which it does not now possess?  Perhaps no entirely satisfactory reply can be made.  Some observers have believed that they detected unmistakable indications of alluvial deposits on lunar plains, and of the existence of beaches on the shores of the “seas.”  Messrs. Loewy and Puiseux, of the Paris Observatory, whose photographs of the moon are perhaps the finest yet made, say on this subject: