t signing
your name to it." This MS. is entitled "_Selenographia_, or News
from the world in the moon to the lunatics of this world. By Lucas
Lunanimus of Lunenberge." [53] We are here told how the author,
"making himself a kite of ye hight(?) of a large sheet, and tying
himself to the tayle of it, by the help of some trusty friends, to
whom he promised mountains of land in this his new-found world;
being furnished also with a tube, horoscope, and other instruments
of discovery, he set saile the first of Aprill, a day alwaies esteemed
prosperous for such adventures." Fearing, however, lest the date of
departure should make some suspicious that the author was desirous
of making his readers April fools, we leave this aerial tourist to
pursue his explorations without our company, and listen to a learned
bishop, who ought to be a canonical authority, for the man in the
moon himself is an overseer of men. Dr. Francis Godwin, first of
Llandaff, afterwards of Hereford, wrote about the year 1600 _The
Man in the Moone_, or a discourse of a voyage thither. This was
published in 1638, under the pseudonym of Domingo Gonsales. The
enterprising aeronaut went up from the island of El Pico, carried by
wild swans. _Swans_, be it observed. It was not a wild-goose chase.
The author is careful to tell us what we believe so soon as it is
declared. "The further we went, the lesser the globe of the earth
appeared to us; whereas still on the contrary side the moone showed
herselfe more and more monstrously huge." After eleven days'
passage, the exact time that Arago allowed for a cannon ball to
reach the moon, "another earth" was approached. "I perceived that it
was covered for the most part with a huge and mighty sea, those
parts only being drie land, which show unto us here somewhat
darker than the rest of her body; that I mean which the country
people call _el hombre della Luna_, the man of the moone."
This last clause demands a protest. The bishop knocks the
country-people's man out of the moon, to make room for his own
man, which episcopal creation is twenty-eight feet high, and weighs
twenty-five or thirty of any of us. Besides ordinary men, of
extraordinary measurement, the bishop finds in the moon princes
and queens. The females, or lunar ladies, as a matter of course, are
of absolute beauty. Their language has "no affinity with any other I
ever heard." This is a poor look-out for the American divine who
expects to send English Bibles