vain opinions, nattering hopes, false valuations, and the like, it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things?' The 'Moon Hoax,' which was published in the New York _Sun_ in 1835, was one of the most skilful and successful of these literary frauds. Successive numbers of that paper contained a pretended extract from the pages of a supplement to the _Edinburgh Journal of Science_, under the title of 'Great Astronomical Discoveries latterly made by Sir John Herschel, LL.D., F.R.S., at the Cape of Good Hope.' The paper had a remarkable air of scientific research, such as might deceive all but the most learned and wary. The Herschel telescope was represented as affording a distinct view of lunar roads, rocks, seas, cascades, forests, houses, people, and monsters of various shapes. The 'Roorback Hoax' was a shameless attempt to injure the character of J. K. Polk, when he was a candidate for the Presidency, by representing him as possessing forty-three slaves who had his initials branded into their flesh. The deception was wrought by simply adding to a sentence in Featherstonehaugh's Travels in America four lines of the hoaxer's own, recording the disgraceful lie referred to. We confess that we cannot recognise the morality of a transaction which Mr. Maverick records in the history of the _New York Times_, without apparently the slightest suspicion of its dishonesty. When the _New York Herald_ got hold of the single survivor of the ill-fated Atlantic steamer, _Arctic_, which was lost in September, 1854, an assistant on the _Times_ succeeded, by means of an adroit pressman, in purloining an early copy from the _Herald_ press-rooms, and actually published the _Herald's_ report an hour earlier than that journal. We cannot understand what Mr. Maverick means by representing the _Herald_ as 'playing a trick to keep the news from the other papers,' unless the _Herald_ was actually bound to supply its contemporaries gratuitously with the exclusive news it had obtained from the survivor at its own sole expense. The transaction seems to us merely a clever specimen of American 'smartness.'