returns to his former state of imbecility. Both parties are entirely
unconscious of the change--one, of what he has lost, and the other of
what he has gained."

The Brahmin then added: "Though our party are the only voyagers of which
authentic history affords any testimony, yet it is probable, from obscure
hints in some of our most ancient writings in the Sanscrit, that the
voyage has been made in remote periods of antiquity; and the Lunarians
have a similar tradition. While, in the revolutions which have so changed
the affairs of mankind on our globe, (and probably in its satellite,)
the art has been lost, faint traces of its existence may be perceived
in the opinions of the vulgar, and in many of their ordinary forms of
expression. Thus it is generally believed throughout all Asia, that the
moon has an influence on the brain; and when a man is of insane mind, we
call him a lunatic. One of the curses of the common people is, 'May the
moon eat up your brains;' and in China they say of a man who has done
any act of egregious folly, 'He was gathering wool in the moon.'"

I was struck with these remarks, and told the Hermit that the language
of Europe afforded the same indirect evidence of the fact he mentioned:
that my own language especially, abounded with expressions which could
be explained on no other hypothesis;--for, besides the terms "lunacy,"
"lunatic," and the supposed influence of the moon on the brain, when we
see symptoms of a disordered intellect, we say the mind _wanders_,
which evidently alludes to a part of it rambling to a distant region, as
is the moon. We say too, a man is "_out of his head_," that is, his
mind being in another man's head, must of course be out of his own.
To "know no more than the man in the moon," is a proverbial expression
for ignorance, and is without meaning, unless it be considered to refer
to the Glonglims. We say that an insane man is "distracted;" by which we