The Silver Messenger

Februarys Without Full Moon.

A correspondent corrects some erroneous statements about a month with no full moon, which appeared recently in a paragraph quoted from a Missouri paper. "As a matter of fact," he says, "the month of February, 1886, had a full moon, which fell on the 18th, as reference to the almanac for that year will show. The month of February, 1893, however, had no full moon, nor did that of 1866, and this is no infrequent occurrence, but happens every twenty or thirty years. The month of February having, except in leap year, only twenty-eight days, and the moon's phases being separated by an average period of twenty-nine days, it of necessity follows that in February frequently only three such phases occur. The phenomena is therefore neither rare nor of any interest, and the only wonder is who could first have started so foolish a story as that no month without a full moon had occurred since the creation of the world, nor would recur again for two and a half million years."—New York Tribune.