As for the inspiration of the moon story, the record is nebulous. If Poe was really grieved at his first thought that Locke had taken from him the main imaginative idea--that the moon was inhabited--then Poe was oversensitive or uninformed, for that idea was at least two centuries old. Francis Godwin, an English bishop and author, who was born in 1562, and who died just two centuries before the _Sun_ was first printed, wrote “The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales, the Speedy Messenger.” This was published in London in 1638, five years after the author’s death. In the same year there appeared a book called “The Discovery of a World in the Moone,” which contained arguments to prove the moon habitable. It was written by John Wilkins--no relative of the fictitious _Peter_ of Paltock’s story, but a young English clergyman who later became Bishop of Chester, and who was the first secretary of the Royal Society. Two years later Wilkins added to his “Discovery of a World” a “Discourse Concerning the Possibility of a Passage Thither.” Cyrano de Bergerac, he of the long nose and the passion for poetry and duelling, later to be immortalized by Rostand, read these products of two Englishmen’s fancy, and about 1650 he turned out his joyful “Histoire Comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune.” But Bergerac had also been influenced by Dante and by Lucian, the latter being the supposed inspiration of the fanciful narratives of Rabelais and Swift. Perhaps these writers influenced Godwin and Wilkins also; so the trail, zigzagged and ramifying, goes back to the second century. It is hard to indict a man for being inspired, and in the case of the moon story there is no evidence of plagiarism. If “Hans Pfaall” were to be compared with Locke’s story for hoaxing qualities, it would only suffer by the comparison. It would appear as the youthful product of a tyro, as against the cunning work of an artist of almost devilish ingenuity. Is there any doubt that the moon hoax was the sole work of Richard Adams Locke? So far as concerns the record of the _Sun_, the comments of Locke’s American contemporaries, and the belief of Benjamin H. Day, expressed in 1883 in a talk with Edward P. Mitchell, the answer must be in the negative. Yet it must be set down, as a literary curiosity at least, that it has been believed in France and by at least one English antiquary of repute that the moon hoax was the work of a Frenchman--Jean Nicolas Nicollet, the astronomer.