Before going further, let us take notice that the seventeenth
century is, par excellence, the century distinguished for
narratives of imaginary travels. It was then that astronomy
opened up its world of marvels. The knowledge of observers was
vastly increased, and from that time it became possible to
distinguish the surface of the moon and of other celestial
bodies. Thus a new world, as it were, was revealed for human
thought and speculation. We learned that our globe was not, as
we had supposed, the centre of the universe. It was assigned its
place far from that centre, and was known to be no more than a
mere atom, lost amid an incalculable number of other globes. The
revelations of the telescope proved that those who formerly were
considered wise actually knew nothing. Quickly following these
discoveries, extraordinary narratives of excursions through space
began to be given to the world.

Those scientific romances were simply wild exaggerations, based
upon the thinnest foundation of scientific facts. In order,
however, to describe a journey among the stars, it was necessary
to invent some mode of locomotion in these distant regions. In
former times Lucian had been content with a ship which ascended
to the rising moon upon a waterspout; but it was now necessary to
improve upon this very primitive mode, as people began to know
something more of the forces of nature. One of the first of
these travellers in imagination to the moon in modern times was
Godwin (1638), and his plan was more ingenious than that of
Lucian. He trained a great number of the wild swans of St.
Helena to fly constantly upward toward a white object, and,
having succeeded in thus training them, one fine night he threw
himself off the Peak of Teneriffe, poised upon a piece of board,