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
soft-looking substance, smooth, shining, and striped
with various colors. In its talons, the monster was
bearing away, to his eyrie in the heavens, a house from
which it had knocked off the roof, and in the interior
of which we distinctly saw human beings, who, beyond
doubt, were in a state of frightful despair at the horrible fate which awaited them. We shouted with all
our might, in the hope of frightening the bird into
letting go of its prey; but it merely gave a snort or
puff, as if of rage, and then let fall upon our heads a
heavy sack which proved to be filled with sand!"
"Stuff!" said the king.
"'It was just after this adventure that we encountered a continent of immense extent and of prodigious solidity, but which, nevertheless, was supported
entirely upon the back of a sky-blue cow that had no
fewer than four hundred horns.' 1
*" That, now, I believe," said the king, " because I
have read something of the kind before, in a book."
"'We passed immediately beneath this continent
(swimming in between the legs of the cow), and, after
some hours, found ourselves in a wonderful country
indeed, which, I was informed by the man-animal,
was his own native land, inhabited by things of his
own species. This elevated the man-animal very
much in my esteem; and in fact, I now began to feel
ashamed of the contemptuous familiarity with which
I had treated him; for I found that the man-animals
in general were a nation of the most powerful magicians, who lived with worms in their brain,2 which, no
1 " The earth is upheld by a cow of a blue color, having horns
four hundred in number." - SALE'S Koran.
2 ", The Entozoa, or intestinal worms, have repeatedly been observed in the muscles, and in the cerebral substance of men."
Sec WYATT'S Physiology, p. 143.
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