The accounts of preliminary researches, doubts, and difficulties are in both cases very similar in tone. "It appears that five months ago," says the narrator of the Australian hoax, "Signor Rotura called upon Mr. Grant to invoke his assistance in a scheme for the transmission of live stock to Europe. Signor Rotura averred that he had discovered a South American vegetable poison, allied to the well-known _woolara_ (_sic_) that had the power of perfectly suspending animation, and that the trance thus produced continued until the application of another vegetable essence caused the blood to resume its circulation and the heart its functions. So perfect, moreover, was this suspension of life that Signor Rotura had found in a warm climate decomposition set in at the extremities after a week of this living death, and he imagined that if the body in this inert state were reduced to a temperature sufficiently low to arrest decomposition, the trance might be kept up for months, possibly for years. He frankly owned that he had never tried this preserving of the tissues by cold, and could not confidently speak as to its effect upon the after-restoration of the animal operated on. Before he left Mr. Grant he had turned that gentleman's doubts into wondering curiosity by experimenting on his dog." The account of this experiment I defer for a moment till I have shown how closely in several respects this portion of the Australian hoax resembles the corresponding part of the American story. It will be observed that the great discovery is presented as simply a very surprising development of a process which is strictly within the limits, not only of what is possible, but of what is known. So also in the case of the Lunar Hoax, the amazing magnifying power by which living creatures in the moon were said to have been rendered visible, was presented as simply a very remarkable development of the familiar properties of the telescope. In both cases, the circumstances which in reality limit the possible extension of the properties in question were kept conveniently concealed from view. In both cases, doubts and difficulties were urged with an apparent frankness intended to disarm suspicion. In both cases, also, the inventor of the new method by which difficulties were to be overcome is represented as in conference with a man of nearly equal skill, who urges the doubts naturally suggested by the wonderful nature of the promised achievements. In the Lunar Hoax, Sir John Herschel and Sir David Brewster are thus represented in conference. Herschel asks whether the difficulty arising from deficient illumination may not be overcome by effecting a transfusion of artificial light through the focal image. Brewster, startled at the novel thought, as he well might be, hesitatingly refers "to the refrangibility of rays and the angle of incidence," which is effective though glorious in its absurdity. (Yet it has been gravely asserted that this nonsense deceived Arago.) "Sir John,