same epoch Cyrano de Bergerac published the celebrated expedition that
had so much success in France. Later on, another Frenchman (that nation
took a great deal of notice of the moon), named Fontenelle, wrote his
_Plurality of Worlds_, a masterpiece of his time; but science in its
progress crushes even masterpieces! About 1835, a pamphlet, translated
from the _New York American_, related that Sir John Herschel, sent to
the Cape of Good Hope, there to make astronomical observations, had, by
means of a telescope, perfected by interior lighting, brought the moon
to within a distance of eighty yards. Then he distinctly perceived
caverns in which lived hippopotami, green mountains with golden borders,
sheep with ivory horns, white deer, and inhabitants with membraneous
wings like those of bats. This treatise, the work of an American named
Locke, had a very great success. But it was soon found out that it was a
scientific mystification, and Frenchmen were the first to laugh at it."

"Laugh at an American!" cried J.T. Maston; "but that's a _casus belli_!"

"Be comforted, my worthy friend; before Frenchmen laughed they were
completely taken in by our countryman. To terminate this rapid history,
I may add that a certain Hans Pfaal, of Rotterdam, went up in a balloon
filled with a gas made from azote, thirty-seven times lighter than
hydrogen, and reached the moon after a journey of nineteen days. This
journey, like the preceding attempts, was purely imaginary, but it was
the work of a popular American writer of a strange and contemplative
genius. I have named Edgar Poe!"

"Hurrah for Edgar Poe!" cried the assembly, electrified by the words of
the president.

"I have now come to an end of these attempts which I may call purely