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

84

THE STORY OF "THE SUN"

The conclusion of this astounding narrative, which
totalled eleven thousand words, was printed on August
31. In the valley of the temple a new set of man-bats
was found:
We had no opportunity of seeing them actually engaged in any work of industry or art; and, so far as we
could judge, they spent their happy hours in collecting
various fruits in the woods, in eating, flying, bathing,
and loitering about upon the summits of precipices.
One night, when the astronomers finished work, they
neglectfully left the telescope facing the eastern horizon. The risen sun burned a hole fifteen feet in circumference through the reflecting chamber, and ruined
part of the observatory. When the damage was repaired, the moon was invisible, and so Dr. Herschel
turned his attention to Saturn. Most of the discoveries
here were technical, as the Sun assured its readers, and
the narrative came to an end. An editorial note added:
This concludes the supplement with the exception of
forty pages of illustrative and mathematical notes,
which would greatly enhance the size and price of this
work without commensurably adding to its general interest. In order that our readers may judge for themselves whether we have withheld from them any matter
of general comprehension and interest, we insert one
of the notes from those pages of the supplement which
we thought it useless to reprint; and it may be considered a fair sample of the remainder. For ourselves,
we know nothing of mathematics beyond counting dollars and cents, but to geometricians the following new
method of measuring the height of the lunar mountains,
adopted by Sir John Herschel, may be quite interesting.
Perhaps the pretended method of measuring lunar
mountains was not interesting to laymen, but it may
have been the cause of an intellectual tumult at Yale.