If the world, then, will persistently intrust its health and wealth into the safe-keeping of charlatans, what can we expect when things supposedly of far less value are at stake? The famous Moon Hoax, as we now call it, is truly a classic piece of lying. Though it dates from as long ago as 1835, it has never had an equal as a piece of "modern" journalism. Nothing could be more useful than to recall it to public attention at least once every decade; for it teaches an important lesson that needs to be iterated again and again. On November 13, 1833, Sir John Herschel embarked on the Mountstuart Elphinstone, bound for the Cape of Good Hope. He took with him a collection of astronomical instruments, with which he intended to study the heavens of the southern hemisphere, and thus extend his father's great work to the south polar stars. An earnest student of astronomy, he asked no better than to be left in peace to seek the truth in his own fashion. Little did he think that his expedition would be made the basis for a fabrication of alleged astronomical discoveries destined to startle a hemisphere. Yet that is precisely what happened. Some time about the middle of the year 1835 the New York _Sun_ began the publication of certain articles, purporting to give an account of "Great Astronomical Discoveries, lately made by Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope." It was alleged that these articles were taken from a supplement to the Edinburgh _Journal of Science_; yet there is no doubt that they were manufactured entirely in the United States, and probably in New York. The hoax begins at once in a grandiloquent style, calculated to attract popular attention, and well fitted to the marvels about to be related. Here is an introductory remark, as a specimen: "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." Then follows a circumstantial and highly plausible account of the manner in which early and exclusive information was obtained from the Cape. This was, of course, important in order to make people believe in the genuineness of the whole; but we pass at once to the more interesting account of Herschel's supposed instrument.