The story of the Sun, New York, 1833-1918 / by Frank M. O'Brien.

RICHARD ADAMS LOCKE'S MOON HOAX 83

traits which the author was enabled to discover by reason of the conjugal relations he entered into with one of
the females of the winged tribe.
Peter Wilkins was the hero of Robert Paltock's imaginative book, " The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man," published in London in 1750.
Paltock's winged people, said Southey, were " the most
beautiful creatures of imagination that were ever devised."
The instalment of the discoveries printed on August
29 revealed to the reader the great Temple of the Moon,
built of polished sapphire, with a roof of some yellow
metal, supported by columns seventy feet high and six
feet in diameter:
It was open on all sides, and seemed to contain
neither seats, altars, nor offerings, but it was a light
and airy structure, nearly a hundred feet high from
its white, glistening floor to the glowing roof, and it
stood upon a round, green eminence on the eastern side
of the valley. We afterward, however, discovered two
others which were in every respect facsimiles of this
one; but in neither did we perceive any visitants except
flocks of wild doves, which alighted on its lustrous
pinnacles.
Had the devotees of these temples gone the way of all
living, or were the latter merely historical monuments?
What did the ingenious builders mean by the globe surrounded with flames? Did they, by this, record any
past calamity of their world, or predict any future one
of ours? I by no means despair of ultimately solving
not only these, but a thousand other questions which
present themselves respecting the object in this planet;
for not the millionth part of her surface has yet been
explored, and we have been more desirous of collecting
the greatest possible number of new facts than of indulging in speculative theories, however seductive to the
imagination.