errestrial globe! There are no means of
leaving that house for the moon or Mars, or Venus, or Jupiter, or
any other planet of the solar system. And so of necessity we have to
find out what it is that takes place, not in the infinite void, but
within the atmospherical zones. In fact, if there is no air there is
no noise, and as there was a noise--that famous trumpet, to wit--the
phenomenon must occur in the air, the density of which invariably
diminishes, and which does not extend for more than six miles round
our spheroid.

Naturally the newspapers took up the question in their thousands, and
treated it in every form, throwing on it both light and darkness,
recording many things about it true or false, alarming and
tranquillizing their readers--as the sale required--and almost
driving ordinary people mad. At one blow party politics dropped
unheeded--and the affairs of the world went on none the worse for it.

But what could this thing be? There was not an observatory that was
not applied to. If an observatory could not give a satisfactory
answer what was the use of observatories? If astronomers, who doubled
and tripled the stars a hundred thousand million miles away, could
not explain a phenomenon occurring only a few miles off, what was the
use of astronomers?

The observatory at Paris was very guarded in what it said. In the
mathematical section they had not thought the statement worth
noticing; in the meridional section they knew nothing about it; in
the physical observatory they had not come across it; in the geodetic
section they had had no observation; in the meteorological section
there had been no record; in the calculating room they had had
nothing to deal with. At any rate this confession was a frank one,
and the same frankness characterized the replies from the observatory
of Montsouris and the magnetic station in the park of St. Maur. The
same respect for the truth distinguished the Bureau des Longitudes.

The provinces were slightly more affirmative. Perhaps in the night of
the fifth and the morning of the sixth of May there had appeared a
flash of light of electrical origin which lasted about twenty
seconds. At the Pic du Midi this light appeared between nine and ten
in the evening. At the Meteorological Observatory on the Puy de Dome
the light had been observed between one and two o'clock in the
morning; at Mont Ventoux in Provence it had been seen between two and
three o'clock; at Nice it had been n