THE MOON AND LUNAR INFLUENCE.
From the stars in general to the moon in particular, there is but a step;
nor will we separate the midnight luminary from the company in which we
usually find her. Lovers and poets have from time immemorial found solace
in her beams; while the early philosophers pretended that she swallowed
stones in the manner of the mountebanks, in order to cast them down upon
us in the form of aërolites. This conclusion is as absurd as a thousand
others, of which the moon has been the object. The ingenuousness of the
old lady, who on hearing continually of new moons, inquired anxiously what
became of the old ones, is scarcely more surprising than the complex mass
of commentaries and hypotheses which regard the influence of the orb of
night.
In former centuries, it was the custom to attribute the decay of public
monuments to the influence of the moon upon the surface of granite and
stone. Naturalists, however, having watched the work of animalculæ among
oysters, madrepores and corals, attributed this to the true cause. In the
year 1666, a physician of Caen remarked upon a stone wall of southern
aspect forming part of the Abbey of the Benedictines, a number of
cavities, into the deep sinuosities of which the hand could be inserted.
Instead of attributing this to the moon, he ascertained that they were
worked by insects whom he found concealed in the cavities. Experiment
opens the safest road to truth; while absurd theories transmitted from
generation to generation, obstruct the steps of a temple already
sufficiently difficult of ascent.
Thomas Moult, the author of an almanack superior to the general run of
those popular publications, devoted himself to conjectures on the
variations of the weather as influenced by the moon; and consulted the
observations previously made by the Abbé Toaldo, who had noted down the
effect of eleven hundred and six moons upon the weather. He found that
nine hundred and fifty were accompanied by changes of weather; while the
other one hundred and fifty six, produced no effect. The proportion being
as one to six, the chances are that a new moon will produce a change of
weather; the influence being susceptible of increase from various
circumstances, in the proportion of thirty-three to one, when the new moon
is at its perigæum.
Physicians formerly believed the phases of the moon to influence certain
diseases. Hippocrates and Galen assigned them as the cause of periodical
returns of epilepsy; while people of deranged intellect are vulgarly
styled lunatics. Bertholon observed the paroxysms of a maniac during one
year, and declared them to be aggravated by the full moon. It has been
asserted that among maritime populations, a greater number of deaths
occurred at the ebb than at the flow of the tide. At Brest, Rochefort and
St. Malo, a register was kept for thirty months of the number of deaths,
and the hours at which they took place; when the number was found to be
less at the hours supposed most fatal. The doctrine of Aristotle, which
had still many adherents, was overthrown by experience.
Dr. Mead, an English physician, wrote a treatise on the influence of the
moon upon the human constitution, which has also fallen into oblivion.