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

which now rushed upwards by the balloon with a
frequency more and more appalling.
April I8th. To-day I found an enormous increase
in the moon's apparent bulk - and the evidently
accelerated velocity of my descent began to fill me
with alarm. It will be remembered that, in the
earliest stage of my speculations upon the possibility
of a passage to the moon, the existence, in its vicinity,
of an atmosphere dense in proportion to the bulk of
the planet, had entered largely into my calculations;
this too in spite of many theories to the contrary, and,
it may be added, in spite of a general disbelief in the
existence of any lunar atmosphere at all. But, in
addition to what I have already urged in regard to
Encke's comet and the zodiacal light, I had been
strengthened in my opinion by certain observations
of Mr. Schroeter, of Lilienthal. He observed the
moon, when two days and a half old, in the evening
soon after sunset, before the dark part was visible,
and continued to watch it until it became visible.
The two cusps appeared tapering in a very sharp
faint prolongation, each exhibiting its farthest extremity faintly illuminated by the solar rays, before
any part of the dark hemisphere was visible. Soon
afterwards, the whole dark limb became illuminated.
This prolongation of the cusps beyond the semicircle,
I thought, must have arisen from the refraction of
the sun's rays by the moon's atmosphere. I computed, also, the height of the atmosphere (which could
refract light enough into its dark hemisphere to
produce a twilight more luminous than the light
reflected from the earth when the moon is about 32~
from the new) to be 1,356 Paris feet; in this view, I
supposed the greatest height capable of refracting
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