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

tance of thirty or forty miles within the bowels of the
earth, and that contained a greater number of far
more spacious and more magnificent palaces than are
to be found in all Damascus and Bagdad. From the
roofs of these palaces there hung myriads of gems,
like diamonds, but larger than men; and in among
the streets of towers and pyramids and temples, there
flowed immense rivers as black as ebony, and swarming with fish that had no eyes.'"l
"Hum!" said the king.
"'We then swam into a region of the sea where we
found a lofty mountain, down whose sides there
streamed torrents of melted metal, some of which were
twelve miles wide and sixty miles long,2 while from an
abyss on the summit issued so vast a quantity of
ashes that the sun was entirely blotted out from the
heavens, and it became darker than the darkest midnight; so that, when we were even at the distance of
a hundred and fifty miles from the mountain, it was
impossible to see the whitest object, however close we
held it to our eyes.' " 8
or Ireland, it might pass without remark for some enormous
drained bog, on which the exhumed trees lay rotting in the sun.
The roots and rudiments of the branches are, in many cases, nearly
perfect, and in some the worm-holes eaten under the bark are
readily recognizable. The most delicate of the sap vessels, and all
the finer portions of the centre of the wood, are perfectly entire,
and bear to be examined with the strongest magnifiers. The whole
are so thoroughly silicified as to scratch glass and be capable of
receiving the highest polish." - Asiatic Journal, iii. p. 359
(Third Series).
1 The Mammoth Cave of Kentucky. 2 In Iceland, 1783.
8 " During the eruption of Hecla, in 1766, clouds of this kind
produced such a degree of darkness that, at Glaumba, which is more
than fifty leagues distant from the mountain, people could only find
their way by groping. During the eruption of Vesuvius, in 1794,
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