Then he gave them an account of the famous moon hoax, which came
out in 1835. It was full of the most barefaced absurdities, yet
people swallowed it all; and even Arago is said to have treated it
seriously as a thing that could not well be true, for Mr. Herschel
would have certainly notified him of these marvellous discoveries.
The writer of it had not troubled himself to invent probabilities,
but had borrowed his scenery from the 'Arabian Nights' and his
lunar inhabitants from 'Peter Wilkins.'--OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (in
_The Poet at the Breakfast-Table_).

In one of the earliest numbers of 'Macmillan's Magazine, the late
Professor De Morgan, in an article on Scientific Hoaxing, gave a brief
account of the so-called 'lunar hoax'--an instance of scientific
trickery frequently mentioned, though probably few are familiar with the
real facts. De Morgan himself possessed a copy of the second English
edition of the pamphlet, published in London in 1836. But the original
pamphlet edition, published in America in September 1835, is not easily
to be obtained. The proprietors of the New York 'Sun,' in which the
fictitious narrative first appeared, published an edition of 60,000
copies, and every copy was sold in less than a month. Lately a single
copy of that edition was sold for three dollars seventy-five cents.[45]

The pamphlet is interesting in many respects, and I propose to give
here a brief account of it. But first it may be well to describe briefly
the origin of the hoax.

It is said that after the French revolution of 1830 Nicollet, a French
astronomer of some repute, especially for certain lunar observations of
a very delicate and difficult kind, left France in debt and also in bad
odour with the republican party. According to this story, Arago the
astronomer was especially obnoxious to Nicollet, and it was as much with
the view of revenging himself on his foe as from a wish to raise a
little money that Nicollet wrote the moon-fable. It is said further that
Arago was entrapped, as Nicollet desired, and circulated all over Paris
the wonders related in the pamphlet, until Nicollet wrote to his friend
Bouvard explaining the trick. So runs the story, but the story cannot be
altogether true. Nicollet may have prepared the narrative and partly
written it, but there are passages in the pamphlet as published in
America which no astronomer could have written. Possibly there is s