“And,” continued he, “why cannot the illuminated microscope, say the hydro-oxygen, be applied to render distinct and, if necessary, even to magnify, the focal object?”
Sir David sprang from his chair in an ecstasy of conviction, and, leaping half-way to the ceiling, exclaimed:
“Thou art the man!”
Details of the casting of a great lens came next. It was twenty-four feet in diameter, and weighed nearly fifteen thousand pounds after it was polished; its estimated magnifying-power was forty-two thousand times. As he saw it safely started on its way to Africa, Sir John “expressed confidence in his ultimate ability to study even the entomology of the moon, in case she contained insects upon her surface.”
Thus ended the first instalment of the story. Where had the Sun got the Journal of Science supplement? An editorial article answered that “it was very politely furnished us by a medical gentleman immediately from Scotland, in consequence of a paragraph which appeared on Friday last from the Edinburgh Courant.” The article added:
The portion which we publish to-day is introductory to celestial discoveries of higher and more universal interest than any, in any science yet known to the human race. Now indeed it may be said that we live in an age of discovery.
It cannot be said that the whole town buzzed with excitement that day. Perhaps this first instalment was a bit over the heads of most readers; it was so technical, so foreign. But in Nassau and Ann Streets, wherever two newspapermen were gathered together, there was buzzing enough. What was coming next? Why hadn’t they thought to subscribe to the Edinburgh Journal of Science, with its wonderful supplement?
Nearly four columns of the revelations appeared on the following day—August 26, 1835. This time the reading public came trooping into camp, for the Sun’s reprint of the Journal of Science supplement got beyond the stage of preliminaries and predictions, and began to tell of what was to be seen on the moon. Scientists and newspapermen appreciated the detailed description of the mammoth telescope and the work of placing it, but the public, like a child, wanted the moon—and got it. Let us plunge in at about the point where the public plunged:
The specimen of lunar vegetation, however, which they had already seen, had decided a question of too exciting an interest to induce them to retard its exit. It had demonstrated that the moon has an atmosphere constituted similarly to our own, and capable of sustaining organized and, therefore, most probably, animal life.
“The trees,” says Dr. Grant, “for a period of ten minutes were of one unvaried kind, and unlike any I have seen except the largest class of yews in the English churchyards, which they in some respects resemble. These were followed by a level green plain which, as measured by the painted circle on our canvas of forty-nine feet, must have been more than half a mile in breadth.”