l.

Before going further, let us take notice that the seventeenth century
is, par excellence, the century distinguished for narratives of
imaginary travels. It was then that astronomy opened up its world of
marvels. The knowledge of observers was vastly increased, and from that
time it became possible to distinguish the surface of the moon and of
other celestial bodies. Thus a new world, as it were, was revealed for
human thought and speculation. We learned that our globe was not, as we
had supposed, the centre of the universe. It was assigned its place far
from that centre, and was known to be no more than a mere atom, lost
amid an incalculable number of other globes. The revelations of the
telescope proved that those who formerly were considered wise actually
knew nothing. Quickly following these discoveries, extraordinary
narratives of excursions through space began to be given to the world.

Those scientific romances were simply wild exaggerations, based upon the
thinnest foundation of scientific facts. In order, however, to describe
a journey among the stars, it was necessary to invent some mode of
locomotion in these distant regions. In former times Lucian had been
content with a ship which ascended to the rising moon upon a waterspout;
but it was now necessary to improve upon this very primitive mode, as
people began to know something more of the forces of nature. One of the
first of these travellers in imagination to the moon in modern times was
Godwin (1638), and his plan was more ingenious than that of Lucian. He
trained a great number of the wild swans of St. Helena to fly constantly
upward toward a white object, and, having succeeded in thus training
them, one fine night he threw himself off the Peak of Teneriffe, poised
upon a piece of board, which was borne upward to the white moon by a
great team of the gigantic swans. At the end of twelve days he arrived,
according to his story, at his destination. A little later another
writer of this peculiar kind of fiction, Wilkins, an Englishman,
professed to have made the same ascent, borne up by an eagle. Alexandre
Dumas, who recently wrote a short romance upon the same subject, only
made a translation of an English work by that author. Wilkins' work is
entitled, "The Discovery of a New World." One chapter of the book bears
the title, "That 'tis possible for some of our posterity to find out a
conveyance to this other world; and, if there be inhabitants there, to