The works of Edgar Allan Poe; newly collected and edited, with a memoir, critical introductions, and notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry; the illustrations by Albert Edward Sterner.

TALES OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE

-the rarefaction would be so excessive that animal
life could in no manner be sustained, and, moreover,
that the most delicate means we possess of ascertaining the presence of the atmosphere would be inadequate to assure us of its existence. But I did not
fail to perceive that these latter calculations are
founded altogether on our experimental knowledge of
the properties of air, and the mechanical laws regulating its dilation and compression, in what may be
called, comparatively speaking, the immediate vicinity
of the earth itself; and, at the same time, it is taken
for granted that animal life is, and must be, essentially
incapable of modification at any given unattainable
distance from the surface. Now, all such reasoning,
and from such data, must of course be simply analogical. The greatest height ever reached by man was
that of 25,000 feet, attained in the aeronautic expedition of Messieurs Gay-Lussac and Biot. This is a
moderate altitude, even when compared with the
eighty miles in question; and I could not help thinking that the subject admitted room for doubt, and
great latitude for speculation.
But, in point of fact, an ascension being made to
any given altitude, the ponderable quantity of air surmounted in anyfarther ascension is by no means in
proportion to the additional height ascended (as may
be plainly seen from what has been stated before),
but in a ratio constantly decreasing. It is therefore
evident that, ascend as high as we may, we cannot,
literally speaking, arrive at a limit beyond which no
atmosphere is to be found. It must exist, I argued;
although it may exist in a state of infinite rarefaction.
On the other hand, I was aware that arguments
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