A violent movement of interest and surprise welcomed this sentence of the orator. "Allow me," he resumed, "to recall to you in few words how certain ardent minds, embarked upon imaginary journeys, pretended to have penetrated the secrets of our satellite. In the seventeenth century a certain David Fabricius boasted of having seen the inhabitants of the moon with his own eyes. In 1649 a Frenchman, Jean Baudoin, published his _Journey to the Moon by Dominique Gonzales, Spanish Adventurer_. At the same epoch Cyrano de Bergerac published the celebrated expedition that had so much success in France. Later on, another Frenchman (that nation took a great deal of notice of the moon), named Fontenelle, wrote his _Plurality of Worlds_, a masterpiece of his time; but science in its progress crushes even masterpieces! About 1835, a pamphlet, translated from the _New York American_, related that Sir John Herschel, sent to the Cape of Good Hope, there to make astronomical observations, had, by means of a telescope, perfected by interior lighting, brought the moon to within a distance of eighty yards. Then he distinctly perceived caverns in which lived hippopotami, green mountains with golden borders, sheep with ivory horns, white deer, and inhabitants with membraneous wings like those of bats. This treatise, the work of an American named Locke, had a very great success. But it was soon found out that it was a scientific mystification, and Frenchmen were the first to laugh at it." "Laugh at an American!" cried J.T. Maston; "but that's a _casus belli_!" "Be comforted, my worthy friend; before Frenchmen laughed they were completely taken in by our countryman. To terminate this rapid history, I may add that a certain Hans Pfaal, of Rotterdam, went up in a balloon filled with a gas made from azote, thirty-seven times lighter than hydrogen, and reached the moon after a journey of nineteen days. This journey, like the preceding attempts, was purely imaginary, but it was the work of a popular American writer of a strange and contemplative genius. I have named Edgar Poe!" "Hurrah for Edgar Poe!" cried the assembly, electrified by the words of the president.