Then he gave them an account of the famous moon hoax, which came out in 1835. It was full of the most barefaced absurdities, yet people swallowed it all; and even Arago is said to have treated it seriously as a thing that could not well be true, for Mr. Herschel would have certainly notified him of these marvellous discoveries. The writer of it had not troubled himself to invent probabilities, but had borrowed his scenery from the 'Arabian Nights' and his lunar inhabitants from 'Peter Wilkins.'--OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (in _The Poet at the Breakfast-Table_). In one of the earliest numbers of 'Macmillan's Magazine, the late Professor De Morgan, in an article on Scientific Hoaxing, gave a brief account of the so-called 'lunar hoax'--an instance of scientific trickery frequently mentioned, though probably few are familiar with the real facts. De Morgan himself possessed a copy of the second English edition of the pamphlet, published in London in 1836. But the original pamphlet edition, published in America in September 1835, is not easily to be obtained. The proprietors of the New York 'Sun,' in which the fictitious narrative first appeared, published an edition of 60,000 copies, and every copy was sold in less than a month. Lately a single copy of that edition was sold for three dollars seventy-five cents.[45] The pamphlet is interesting in many respects, and I propose to give here a brief account of it. But first it may be well to describe briefly the origin of the hoax.