Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 - Frank Michael O'Brien - Страница 6

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A Magnificent Fake Which Deceived Two Continents, Brought to “The Sun” the Largest Circulation in the World and, in Poe’s Opinion, Established Penny Papers.

The man whom Day met at the murder trial in White Plains was Richard Adams Locke, a reporter who was destined to kick up more dust than perhaps any other man of his profession. As he comes on the stage, we must let his predecessor, George W. Wisner, pass into the wings.

Wisner was a good man, as a reporter, as a writer of editorial articles, and as part owner of the paper. His campaign for Abolition irritated Mr. Day at first, but the young man’s motives were so pure and his articles so logical that Day recognized the justice of the cause, even as he realized the foolish methods employed by some of the Abolitionists. Wisner set the face of the Sun against slavery, and Day kept it so, but there were minor matters of policy upon which the partners never agreed, never could agree.

When Wisner’s health became poor, in the summer of 1835, he expressed a desire to get away from New York. Mr. Day paid him five thousand dollars for his interest in the paper—a large sum in those days, considering the fact that Wisner had won his share with no capital except his pen. Wisner went West and settled at Pontiac, Michigan. There his health improved, his fortune increased, and he was at one time a member of the Michigan Legislature.

When Day found that Locke was the best reporter attending the trial of Matthias the Prophet, he hired him to write a series of articles on the religious fakir. These, the first “feature stories” that ever appeared in the Sun, were printed on the front page.

A few weeks later, while the Matthias articles were still being sold on the streets in pamphlet form, Locke went to Day and told him that his boss, Colonel Webb of the Courier and Enquirer, had discharged him for working for the Sun “on the side.” Wisner was about to leave the paper, and Day was glad to hire Locke, for he needed an editorial writer. Twelve dollars a week was the alluring wage, and Locke accepted it.

Locke was then thirty-five—ten years senior to his employer. Let his contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe, describe him:

He is about five feet seven inches in height, symmetrically formed; there is an air of distinction about his whole person—the air noble of genius. His face is strongly pitted by the smallpox, and, perhaps from the same cause, there is a marked obliquity in the eyes; a certain calm, clear luminousness, however, about these latter amply compensates for the defect, and the forehead is truly beautiful in its intellectuality. I am acquainted with no person possessing so fine a forehead as Mr. Locke.

Locke was nine years older than Poe, who at this time had most of his fame ahead of him. Poe was quick to recognize the quality of Locke’s writings; indeed, the poet saw, perhaps more clearly than others of that period, that America was full of good writers—a fact of which the general public was neglectful. This was Poe’s tribute to Locke’s literary gift:

His prose style is noticeable for its concision, luminosity, completeness—each quality in its proper place. He has that method so generally characteristic of genius proper. Everything he writes is a model in its peculiar way, serving just the purposes intended and nothing to spare.

The Sun’s new writer was a collateral descendant of John Locke, the English philosopher of the seventeenth century. He was born in 1800, but his birthplace was not New York, as his contemporary biographers wrote. It was East Brent, Somersetshire, England. His early American friends concealed this fact when writing of Locke, for they feared that his English birth (all the wounds of war had not healed) would keep him out of some of the literary clubs. He was educated by his mother and by private tutors until he was nineteen, when he entered Cambridge. While still a student he contributed to the Bee, the Imperial Magazine, and other English publications. When he left Cambridge he had the hardihood to start the London Republican, the title of which describes its purpose. This was a failure, for London declined to warm to the theories of American democracy, no matter how scholarly their expression.

Abandoning the Republican, young Locke devoted himself to literature and science. He ran a periodical called the Cornucopia for about six months, but it was not a financial success, and in 1832, with his wife and infant daughter, he went to New York. Colonel Webb put him at work on his paper.

Locke could write almost anything. In Cambridge and in Fleet Street he had picked up a wonderful store of general information. He could turn out prose or poetry, politics or pathos, anecdotes or astronomy.

While he lived in London, Locke was a regular reader of the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, and he brought some copies of it to America. One of these, an issue of 1826, contained an article by Dr. Thomas Dick, of Dundee, a pious man, but inclined to speculate on the possibilities of the universe. In this article Dr. Dick suggested the feasibility of communicating with the moon by means of great stone symbols on the face of the earth. The people of the moon—if there were any—would fathom the diagrams and reply in a similar way. Dr. Dick explained afterward that he wrote this piece with the idea of satirizing a certain coterie of eccentric German astronomers.

Now it happened that Sir John Frederick William Herschel, the greatest astronomer of his time, and the son of the celebrated astronomer Sir William Herschel, went to South Africa in January, 1834, and established an observatory at Feldhausen, near Cape Town, with the intention of completing his survey of the sidereal heavens by examining the southern skies as he had swept the northern, thus to make the first telescopic survey of the whole surface of the visible heavens.

Locke knew about Sir John and his mission. The Matthias case had blown over, the big fire in Fulton Street was almost forgotten, and things were a bit dull on the island of Manhattan. The newspapers were in a state of armed truce. As Locke and his fellow journalists gathered at the American Hotel bar for their after-dinner brandy, it is probable that there was nothing, not even the great sloth recently arrived at the American Museum, to excite a good argument.

Locke needed money, for his salary of twelve dollars a week could ill support the fine gentleman that he was; so he laid a plan before Mr. Day. It was a plot as well as a plan, and the first angle of the plot appeared on the second page of the Sun on August 21, 1835:

CELESTIAL DISCOVERIES—The Edinburgh Courant says—“We have just learnt from an eminent publisher in this city that Sir John Herschel, at the Cape of Good Hope, has made some astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description, by means of an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.”

Nothing further appeared until Tuesday, August 25, when three columns of the Sun’s first page took the newspaper and scientific worlds by the ears. Those were not the days of big type. The Sun’s heading read:

GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES.

LATELY MADE

BY SIR JOHN HERSCHEL, LL.D., F.R.S., &c.

At the Cape of Good Hope.

[From Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science.]

It may as well be said here that although there had been an Edinburgh Journal of Science, it ceased to exist several years before 1835. The periodical to which Dr. Dick, of Dundee, contributed his moon theories was, in a way, the successor to the Journal of Science, but it was called the New Philosophical Journal. The likeness of names was not great, but enough to cause some confusion. It is also noteworthy that the sly Locke credited to a supplement, rather than to the Journal of Science itself, the revelations which he that day began to pour before the eyes of Sun readers. Thus he started:

In this unusual addition to our Journal we have the happiness of making known to the British public, and thence to the whole civilized world, recent discoveries in astronomy which will build an imperishable monument to the age in which we live, and confer upon the present generation of the human race proud distinction through all future time. It has been poetically said that the stars of heaven are the hereditary regalia of man as the intellectual sovereign of the animal creation. He may now fold the zodiac around him with a loftier consciousness of his mental supremacy.

RICHARD ADAMS LOCKE, AUTHOR OF THE MOON HOAX

From an Engraving in the Possession of His Granddaughter, Mrs. F. Winthrop White of New Brighton, S.I.

After solemnly dwelling on the awe which mortal man must feel upon peering into the secrets of the sky, the article declared that Sir John “paused several hours before he commenced his observations, that he might prepare his own mind for discoveries which he knew would fill the minds of myriads of his fellow men with astonishment.” It continued:

And well might he pause! From the hour the first human pair opened their eyes to the glories of the blue firmament above them, there has been no accession to human knowledge at all comparable in sublime interest to that which he has been the honored agent in supplying. Well might he pause! He was about to become the sole depository of wondrous secrets which had been hid from the eyes of all men that had lived since the birth of time.

At the end of a half-column of glorification, the writer got down to brass tacks:

To render our enthusiasm intelligible, we will state at once that by means of a telescope, of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle, the younger Herschel, at his observatory in the southern hemisphere, has already made the most extraordinary discoveries in every planet of our solar system; has discovered planets in other solar systems; has obtained a distinct view of objects in the moon, fully equal to that which the unaided eye commands of terrestrial objects at the distance of one hundred yards; has affirmatively settled the question whether this satellite be inhabited, and by what orders of beings; has firmly established a new theory of cometary phenomena; and has solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy.

And where was the Journal of Science getting this mine of astronomical revelation for its supplement? The mystery is explained at once:

We are indebted to the devoted friendship of Dr. Andrew Grant, the pupil of the elder, and for several years past the inseparable coadjutor of the younger Herschel. The amanuensis of the latter at the Cape of Good Hope, and the indefatigable superintendent of his telescope during the whole period of its construction and operations, Dr. Grant has been able to supply us with intelligence equal in general interest at least to that which Dr. Herschel himself has transmitted to the Royal Society. For permission to indulge his friendship in communicating this invaluable information to us, Dr. Grant and ourselves are indebted to the magnanimity of Dr. Herschel, who, far above all mercenary considerations, has thus signally honored and rewarded his fellow laborer in the field of science.

Regarding the illustrations which, according to the implications of the text, accompanied the supplement, the writer was specific. Most of them, he stated, were copies of “drawings taken in the observatory by Herbert Home, Esq., who accompanied the last powerful series of reflectors from London to the Cape. The engraving of the belts of Jupiter is a reduced copy of an imperial folio drawing by Dr. Herschel himself. The segment of the inner ring of Saturn is from a large drawing by Dr. Grant.”

A history of Sir William Herschel’s work and a description of his telescopes took up a column of the Sun, and on top of this came the details—as the Journal printed them—of Sir John’s plans to outdo his father by revolutionary methods and a greater telescope. Sir John, it appeared, was in conference with Sir David Brewster:

After a few minutes’ silent thought, Sir John diffidently inquired whether it would not be possible to effect a transfusion of artificial light through the focal object of vision! Sir David, somewhat startled at the originality of the idea, paused a while, and then hesitatingly referred to the refrangibility of rays and the angle of incidence. Sir John, grown more confident, adduced the example of the Newtonian reflector, in which the refrangibility was corrected by the second speculum and the angle of incidence restored by the third.

“And,” continued he, “why cannot the illuminated microscope, say the hydro-oxygen, be applied to render distinct and, if necessary, even to magnify, the focal object?”

Sir David sprang from his chair in an ecstasy of conviction, and, leaping half-way to the ceiling, exclaimed:

“Thou art the man!”

Details of the casting of a great lens came next. It was twenty-four feet in diameter, and weighed nearly fifteen thousand pounds after it was polished; its estimated magnifying-power was forty-two thousand times. As he saw it safely started on its way to Africa, Sir John “expressed confidence in his ultimate ability to study even the entomology of the moon, in case she contained insects upon her surface.”

Thus ended the first instalment of the story. Where had the Sun got the Journal of Science supplement? An editorial article answered that “it was very politely furnished us by a medical gentleman immediately from Scotland, in consequence of a paragraph which appeared on Friday last from the Edinburgh Courant.” The article added:

The portion which we publish to-day is introductory to celestial discoveries of higher and more universal interest than any, in any science yet known to the human race. Now indeed it may be said that we live in an age of discovery.

It cannot be said that the whole town buzzed with excitement that day. Perhaps this first instalment was a bit over the heads of most readers; it was so technical, so foreign. But in Nassau and Ann Streets, wherever two newspapermen were gathered together, there was buzzing enough. What was coming next? Why hadn’t they thought to subscribe to the Edinburgh Journal of Science, with its wonderful supplement?

Nearly four columns of the revelations appeared on the following day—August 26, 1835. This time the reading public came trooping into camp, for the Sun’s reprint of the Journal of Science supplement got beyond the stage of preliminaries and predictions, and began to tell of what was to be seen on the moon. Scientists and newspapermen appreciated the detailed description of the mammoth telescope and the work of placing it, but the public, like a child, wanted the moon—and got it. Let us plunge in at about the point where the public plunged:

The specimen of lunar vegetation, however, which they had already seen, had decided a question of too exciting an interest to induce them to retard its exit. It had demonstrated that the moon has an atmosphere constituted similarly to our own, and capable of sustaining organized and, therefore, most probably, animal life.

“The trees,” says Dr. Grant, “for a period of ten minutes were of one unvaried kind, and unlike any I have seen except the largest class of yews in the English churchyards, which they in some respects resemble. These were followed by a level green plain which, as measured by the painted circle on our canvas of forty-nine feet, must have been more than half a mile in breadth.”

The article had explained that, by means of a great reflector, the lunar views were thrown upon a big canvas screen behind the telescope.

Then appeared as fine a forest of firs, unequivocal firs, as I have ever seen cherished in the bosom of my native mountains. Wearied with the long continuance of these, we greatly reduced the magnifying power of the microscope without eclipsing either of the reflectors, and immediately perceived that we had been insensibly descending, as it were, a mountainous district of highly diversified and romantic character, and that we were on the verge of a lake, or inland sea; but of what relative locality or extent, we were yet too greatly magnified to determine.

On introducing the feeblest achromatic lens we possessed, we found that the water, whose boundary we had just discovered, answered in general outline to the Mare Nubicum of Riccoli. Fairer shores never angel coasted on a tour of pleasure. A beach of brilliant white sand, girt with wild, castellated rocks, apparently of green marble, varied at chasms, occurring every two or three hundred feet, with grotesque blocks of chalk or gypsum, and feathered and festooned at the summits with the clustering foliage of unknown trees, moved along the bright wall of our apartment until we were speechless with admiration.

A column farther on, in a wonderful valley of this wonderful moon, life at last burst upon the seers:

In the shade of the woods on the southeastern side we beheld continuous herds of brown quadrupeds, having all the external characteristics of the bison, but more diminutive than any species of the bos genus in our natural history. Its tail was like that of our bos grunniens; but in its semicircular horns, the hump on its shoulders, the depth of its dewlap, and the length of its shaggy hair, it closely resembled the species to which I have compared it.

It had, however, one widely distinctive feature, which we afterward found common to nearly every lunar quadruped we have discovered; namely, a remarkable fleshy appendage over the eyes, crossing the whole breadth of the forehead and united to the ears. We could most distinctly perceive this hairy veil, which was shaped like the upper front outline of the cap known to the ladies as Mary Queen of Scots cap, lifted and lowered by means of the ears. It immediately occurred to the acute mind of Dr. Herschel that this was a providential contrivance to protect the eyes of the animal from the great extremes of light and darkness to which all the inhabitants of our side of the moon are periodically subjected.

The next animal perceived would be classed on earth as a monster. It was of a bluish lead color, about the size of a goat, with a head and beard like him, and a single horn, slightly inclined forward from the perpendicular. The female was destitute of the horn and beard, but had a much longer tail. It was gregarious, and chiefly abounded on the acclivitous glades of the woods. In elegance of symmetry it rivaled the antelope, and like him it seemed an agile, sprightly creature, running with great speed and springing from the green turf with all the unaccountable antics of the young lamb or kitten.

This beautiful creature afforded us the most exquisite amusement. The mimicry of its movements upon our white-painted canvas was as faithful and luminous as that of animals within a few yards of a camera obscura when seen pictured upon its tympan. Frequently, when attempting to put our fingers upon its beard, it would suddenly bound away into oblivion, as if conscious of our earthly impertinence; but then others would appear, whom we could not prevent nibbling the herbage, say or do what we would to them.

So, at last, the people of earth knew something concrete about the live things of the moon. Goats with beards were there, and every New Yorker knew goats, for they fed upon the rocky hills of Harlem. And the moon had birds, too:

On examining the center of this delightful valley we found a large, branching river, abounding with lovely islands and water-birds of numerous kinds. A species of gray pelican was the most numerous, but black and white cranes, with unreasonably long legs and bill, were also quite common. We watched their piscivorous experiments a long time in hopes of catching sight of a lunar fish; but, although we were not gratified in this respect, we could easily guess the purpose with which they plunged their long necks so deeply beneath the water. Near the upper extremity of one of these islands we obtained a glimpse of a strange amphibious creature of a spherical form, which rolled with great velocity across the pebbly beach, and was lost sight of in the strong current which set off from this angle of the island.

At this point clouds intervened, and the Herschel party had to call it a day. But it had been a big day, and nobody who read the Sun wondered that the astronomers tossed off “congratulatory bumpers of the best ‘East India particular,’ and named this place of wonders the Valley of the Unicorn.” So ended the Sun story of August 26, but an editorial paragraph assured the patrons of the paper that on the morrow there would be a treat even richer.

What did the other papers say? In the language of a later and less elegant period, most of them ate it up—some eagerly, some grudgingly, some a bit dubiously, but they ate it, either in crumbs or in hunks. The Daily Advertiser declared:

No article has appeared for years that will command so general a perusal and publication. Sir John has added a stock of knowledge to the present age that will immortalize his name and place it high on the page of science.

The Mercantile Advertiser, knowing that its lofty readers were unlikely to see the moon revelations in the lowly Sun, hastened to begin reprinting the articles in full, with the remark that the document appeared to have intrinsic evidence of authenticity.

The Times, a daily then only a year old, and destined to live only eighteen months more—later, of course, the title was used by a successful daily—said that everything in the Sun story was probable and plausible, and had an “air of intense verisimilitude.”

The New York Sunday News advised the incredulous to be patient:

Our doubts and incredulity may be a wrong to the learned astronomer, and the circumstances of this wonderful discovery may be correct.

The Courier and Enquirer said nothing at all. Like the Journal of Commerce, it hated the Sun for a lucky upstart. Both of these sixpenny respectables stood silent, with their axes behind their backs. Their own readers, the Livingstons and the Stuyvesants, got not a line about the moon from the blanket sheets, but they sent down into the kitchen and borrowed the Sun from the domestics, on the shallow pretext of wishing to discover whether their employees were reading a moral newspaper—as indeed they were.

The Herald, then about four months old, said not a word about the moon story. In fact, that was a period in which it said nothing at all about any subject, for the fire of that summer had unfortunately wiped out its plant. On the very days when the moon stories appeared, Mr. Bennett stood cracking his knuckles in front of his new establishment, the basement of 202 Broadway, trying to hurry the men who were installing a double-cylinder press. Being a wise person, he advertised his progress in the Sun. It may have vexed him to see the circulation of the Sun—which he had imitated in character and price—bound higher and higher as he stood helpless.

The third instalment of the literary treasure so obligingly imported by the “medical gentleman immediately from Scotland” introduced to Sun readers new and important regions of the moon—the Vagabond Mountains, the Lake of Death, craters of extinct volcanoes twenty-eight hundred feet high, and twelve luxuriant forests divided by open plains “in which waved an ocean of verdure, and which were probably prairies like those of North America.” The details were satisfying:

Dr. Herschel has classified not less than thirty-eight species of forest trees and nearly twice this number of plants, found in this tract alone, which are widely different to those found in more equatorial latitudes. Of animals he classified nine species of mammalia and five of oviparia. Among the former is a small kind of reindeer, the elk, the moose, the horned bear, and the biped beaver.

The last resembles the beaver of the earth in every other respect than its destitution of a tail and its invariable habit of walking upon only two feet. It carries its young in its arms, like a human being, and walks with an easy, gliding motion. Its huts are constructed better and higher than those of many tribes of human savages, and from the appearance of smoke in nearly all of them there is no doubt of its being acquainted with the use of fire.

The largest lake described was two hundred and sixty-six miles long and one hundred and ninety-three wide, shaped like the Bay of Bengal, and studded with volcanic islands. One island in a large bay was pinnacled with quartz crystals as brilliant as fire. Near by roamed zebras three feet high. Golden and blue pheasants strutted about. The beach was covered with shell-fish. Dr. Grant did not say whether the fire-making beavers ever held a clambake there.

The Sun of Friday, August 28, 1835, was a notable issue. Not yet two years old, Mr. Day’s newspaper had the satisfaction of announcing that it had achieved the largest circulation of any daily in the world. It had, it said, 15,440 regular subscribers in New York and 700 in Brooklyn, and it sold 2,000 in the streets and 1,220 out of town—a grand total of 19,360 copies, as against the 17,000 circulation of the London Times. The double-cylinder Napier press in the building at Nassau and Spruce Streets—the corner where the Tribune is to-day, and to which the Sun had moved on August 3—had to run ten hours a day to satisfy the public demand. People waited with more or less patience until three o’clock in the afternoon to read about the moon.

That very issue contained the most sensational instalment of all the moon series, for through that mystic chain which included Dr. Grant, the supplement of the Edinburgh Journal of Science, the “medical gentleman immediately from Scotland,” and the Sun, public curiosity as to the presence of human creatures on the orb of night was satisfied at last. The astronomers were looking upon the cliffs and crags of a new part of the moon:

But whilst gazing upon them in a perspective of about half a mile we were thrilled with astonishment to perceive four successive flocks of large winged creatures, wholly unlike any kind of birds, descend with a slow, even motion from the cliffs on the western side and alight upon the plain. They were first noticed by Dr. Herschel, who exclaimed:

“Now gentlemen, my theories against your proofs, which you have often found a pretty even bet, we have here something worth looking at. I was confident that if ever we found beings in human shape it would be in this longitude, and that they would be provided by their Creator with some extraordinary powers of locomotion. First, exchange for my Number D.”

This lens, being soon introduced, gave us a fine half-mile distance; and we counted three parties of these creatures, of twelve, nine, and fifteen in each, walking erect toward a small wood near the base of the eastern precipices. Certainly they were like human beings, for their wings had now disappeared, and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified.

Having observed them at this distance for some minutes, we introduced lens H.z., which brought them to the apparent proximity of eighty yards—the highest clear magnitude we possessed until the latter end of March, when we effected an improvement in the gas burners.

About half of the first party had passed beyond our canvas; but of all the others we had a perfectly distinct and deliberate view. They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of the shoulders to the calves of the legs.

The face, which was of a yellowish flesh-color, was a slight improvement upon that of the large orang-utan, being more open and intelligent in its expression, and having a much greater expanse of forehead. The mouth, however, was very prominent, though somewhat relieved by a thick beard upon the lower jaw, and by lips far more human than those of any species of the Simia genus.

In general symmetry of body and limbs they were infinitely superior to the orang-utan; so much so that, but for their long wings, Lieutenant Drummond said they would look as well on a parade-ground as some of the old cockney militia. The hair on the head was a darker color than that of the body, closely curled, but apparently not woolly, and arranged in two curious semi-circles over the temples of the forehead. Their feet could only be seen as they were alternately lifted in walking; but from what we could see of them in so transient a view, they appeared thin and very protuberant at the heel.

Whilst passing across the canvas, and whenever we afterward saw them, these creatures were evidently engaged in conversation; their gesticulation, more particularly the varied action of the hands and arms, appeared impassioned and emphatic. We hence inferred that they were rational beings, and, although not perhaps of so high an order as others which we discovered the next month on the shores of the Bay of Rainbows, that they were capable of producing works of art and contrivance.

The next view we obtained of them was still more favorable. It was on the borders of a little lake, or expanded stream, which we then for the first time perceived running down the valley to the large lake, and having on its eastern margin a small wood. Some of these creatures had crossed this water and were lying like spread eagles on the skirts of the wood.

We could then perceive that their wings possessed great expansion, and were similar in structure to those of the bat, being a semi-transparent membrane expanded in curvilineal divisions by means of straight radii, united at the back by the dorsal integuments. But what astonished us very much was the circumstance of this membrane being continued from the shoulders to the legs, united all the way down, though gradually decreasing in width. The wings seemed completely under the command of volition, for those of the creatures whom we saw bathing in the water spread them instantly to their full width, waved them as ducks do theirs to shake off the water, and then as instantly closed them again in a compact form.

Our further observation of the habits of these creatures, who were of both sexes, led to results so very remarkable that I prefer they should be first laid before the public in Dr. Herschel’s own work, where I have reason to know that they are fully and faithfully stated, however incredulously they may be received....

The three families then almost simultaneously spread their wings, and were lost in the dark confines of the canvas before we had time to breathe from our paralyzing astonishment. We scientifically denominated them the vespertilio-homo, or man-bat; and they are doubtless innocent and happy creatures, notwithstanding some of their amusements would but ill comport with our terrestrial notions of decorum.

So ended the account, in Dr. Grant’s words, of that fateful day. The editor of the supplement, perhaps a cousin of the “medical gentleman immediately arrived from Scotland,” added that although he had of course faithfully obeyed Dr. Grant’s injunction to omit “these highly curious passages,” he did not “clearly perceive the force of the reasons assigned for it,” and he added:

From these, however, and other prohibited passages, which will be published by Dr. Herschel with the certificates of the civil and military authorities of the colony, and of several Episcopal, Wesleyan, and other ministers who, in the month of March last, were permitted under the stipulation of temporary secrecy to visit the observatory and become eye-witnesses of the wonders which they were requested to attest, we are confident his forthcoming volumes will be at once the most sublime in science and the most intense in general interest that ever issued from the press.

New York now stopped its discussion of human slavery, the high cost of living—apples cost as much as four cents apiece in Wall Street—and other familiar topics, and devoted its talking hours to the man-bats of the moon. The Sun was stormed by people who wanted back numbers of the stories, and flooded with demands by mail. As the text of the Journal of Science article indicated that the original narrative had been illustrated, there was a cry for pictures.

Mr. Day was busy with the paper and its overworked press, but he gave Mr. Locke a free hand, and that scholar took to Norris & Baker, lithographers, in the Union Building, Wall Street, the drawings which had been intrusted to his care by the “medical gentleman immediately from Scotland.” Mr. Baker, described by the Sun as quite the most talented lithographic artist of the city, worked day and night on his delightful task, that the illustrations might be ready when the Sun’s press should have turned out, in the hours when it was not printing Suns, a pamphlet containing the astronomical discoveries.

“Dr. Herschel’s great work,” said the Sun, “is preparing for publication at ten guineas sterling, or fifty dollars; and we shall give all the popular substance of it for twelve or thirteen cents.” The pamphlets were to be sold two for a quarter; the lithographs at twenty-five cents for the set.

Most newspapers that mentioned the discovery of human creatures on the moon were credulous. The Evening Post, edited by William Cullen Bryant and Fitz-Greene Halleck—“the chanting cherubs of the Post,” as Colonel Webb was wont to call them—only skirted the edge of doubt:

That there should be winged people in the moon does not strike us as more wonderful than the existence of such a race of beings on earth; and that there does or did exist such a race rests on the evidence of that most veracious of voyagers, Peter Wilkins, whose celebrated work not only gives an account of the general appearance and habits of a most interesting tribe of flying Indians, but also of those more delicate and engaging traits which the author was enabled to discover by reason of the conjugal relations he entered into with one of the females of the winged tribe.

Peter Wilkins was the hero of Robert Paltock’s imaginative book, “The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man,” published in London in 1750. Paltock’s winged people, said Southey, were “the most beautiful creatures of imagination that were ever devised.”

The instalment of the discoveries printed on August 29 revealed to the reader the great Temple of the Moon, built of polished sapphire, with a roof of some yellow metal, supported by columns seventy feet high and six feet in diameter:

It was open on all sides, and seemed to contain neither seats, altars, nor offerings, but it was a light and airy structure, nearly a hundred feet high from its white, glistening floor to the glowing roof, and it stood upon a round, green eminence on the eastern side of the valley. We afterward, however, discovered two others which were in every respect facsimiles of this one; but in neither did we perceive any visitants except flocks of wild doves, which alighted on its lustrous pinnacles.

Had the devotees of these temples gone the way of all living, or were the latter merely historical monuments? What did the ingenious builders mean by the globe surrounded with flames? Did they, by this, record any past calamity of their world, or predict any future one of ours? I by no means despair of ultimately solving not only these, but a thousand other questions which present themselves respecting the object in this planet; for not the millionth part of her surface has yet been explored, and we have been more desirous of collecting the greatest possible number of new facts than of indulging in speculative theories, however seductive to the imagination.

The conclusion of this astounding narrative, which totalled eleven thousand words, was printed on August 31. In the valley of the temple a new set of man-bats was found:

We had no opportunity of seeing them actually engaged in any work of industry or art; and, so far as we could judge, they spent their happy hours in collecting various fruits in the woods, in eating, flying, bathing, and loitering about upon the summits of precipices.

One night, when the astronomers finished work, they neglectfully left the telescope facing the eastern horizon. The risen sun burned a hole fifteen feet in circumference through the reflecting chamber, and ruined part of the observatory. When the damage was repaired, the moon was invisible, and so Dr. Herschel turned his attention to Saturn. Most of the discoveries here were technical, as the Sun assured its readers, and the narrative came to an end. An editorial note added:

This concludes the supplement with the exception of forty pages of illustrative and mathematical notes, which would greatly enhance the size and price of this work without commensurably adding to its general interest. In order that our readers may judge for themselves whether we have withheld from them any matter of general comprehension and interest, we insert one of the notes from those pages of the supplement which we thought it useless to reprint; and it may be considered a fair sample of the remainder. For ourselves, we know nothing of mathematics beyond counting dollars and cents, but to geometricians the following new method of measuring the height of the lunar mountains, adopted by Sir John Herschel, may be quite interesting.

Perhaps the pretended method of measuring lunar mountains was not interesting to laymen, but it may have been the cause of an intellectual tumult at Yale. At all events, a deputation from that college hurried to the steamboat and came to New York to see the wonderful supplement. The collegians saw Mr. Day, and voiced their desire.

“Surely,” he replied, “you do not doubt that we have the supplement in our possession? I suppose the magazine is somewhere up-stairs, but I consider it almost an insult that you should ask to see it.”

On their way out the Yale men heard, perhaps from the “devil,” that one Locke was interested in the matter of the moon, that he had handled the supplement, and that he was to be seen at the foot of the stairs, smoking his cigar and gazing across City Hall Park. They advanced upon him, and he, less brusque than Mr. Day, told the scientific pilgrims that the supplement was in the hands of a printer in William Street—giving the name and address.

As the Yale men disappeared in the direction of the printery, Locke started for the same goal, and more rapidly. When the Yalensians arrived, the printer, primed by Locke, told them that the precious pamphlet had just been sent to another shop, where certain proof-reading was to be done. And so they went from post to pillar until the hour came for their return to New Haven. It would not do to linger in New York, for Professors Denison Olmsted and Elias Loomis were that very day getting their first peep at Halley’s comet, about to make the regular appearance with which it favours the earth every seventy-six years.

But Yale was not the only part of intellectual New England to be deeply interested in the moon and its bat-men. The Gazette of Hampshire, Massachusetts, insisted that Edward Everett, who was then running for Governor, had these astronomical discoveries in mind when he declared that “we know not how soon the mind, in its researches into the labyrinth of nature, would grasp some clue which would lead to a new universe and change the aspect of the world.”

Harriet Martineau, who was touring America at the time, wrote in her “Sketches of Western Travel” that the ladies of Springfield, Massachusetts, subscribed to a fund to send missionaries to the benighted luminary. When the Sun articles reached Paris, they were at once translated into illustrated pamphlets, and the caricaturists of the Paris newspapers drew pictures of the man-bats going through the streets singing “Au Clair de la Lune.” London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow made haste to issue editions of the work.

Meanwhile, of course, Sir John Herschel was busy with his telescope at the Cape, all unaware of his expanded fame in the north. Caleb Weeks, of Jamaica, Long Island, the Adam Forepaugh of his day, was setting out for South Africa to get a supply of giraffes for his menagerie, and he had the honour of laying in the great astronomer’s hand a clean copy of the pamphlet. To say that Sir John was amazed at the Sun’s enterprise would be putting it mildly. When he had read the story through, he went to Caleb Weeks and said that he was overcome; that he never could hope to live up to the fame that had been heaped upon him.

In New York, meanwhile, Richard Adams Locke had spilled the beans. There was a reporter named Finn, once employed by the Sun, but later a scribe for the Journal of Commerce. He and Locke were friends. One afternoon Gerard Hallock, who was David Hale’s partner in the proprietorship of the Journal of Commerce, called Finn to his office and told him to get extra copies of the Sun containing the moon story, as the Journal had decided, in justice to its readers, that it must reprint it.

Perhaps at the Sun office, perhaps in the tap-room of the Washington Hotel, Finn met Locke, and they went socially about to public places. Finn told Locke of the work on which he was engaged, and said that, as the moon story was already being put into type at the Journal office, it was likely that it would be printed on the morrow.

“Don’t print it right away,” said Locke. “I wrote it myself.”

The next day the Journal, instead of being silently grateful for the warning, denounced the alleged discoveries as a hoax. Mr. Bennett, who by this time had the Herald once more in running order, not only cried “Hoax!” but named Locke as the author.

Probably Locke was glad that the suspense was over. He is said to have told a friend that he had not intended the story as a hoax, but as satire.

“It is quite evident,” he said, as he saw the whole country take the marvellous narrative seriously, “that it is an abortive satire; and I am the best self-hoaxed man in the whole community.”

But while the Sun’s rivals denounced the hoax, the Sun was not quick to admit that it had gulled not only its own readers but almost all the scientific world. Barring the casual conversation between Locke and Finn, there was no evidence plain enough to convince the layman that it was a hoax. The Sun fenced lightly and skilfully with all controverters. On September 16, more than two weeks after the conclusion of the story, it printed a long editorial article on the subject of the authenticity of the discoveries, mentioning the wide-spread interest that had been displayed in them: