At this point clouds intervened, and the Herschel party had to call it a day. But it had been a big day, and nobody who read the Sun wondered that the astronomers tossed off “congratulatory bumpers of the best ‘East India particular,’ and named this place of wonders the Valley of the Unicorn.” So ended the Sun story of August 26, but an editorial paragraph assured the patrons of the paper that on the morrow there would be a treat even richer.
What did the other papers say? In the language of a later and less elegant period, most of them ate it up—some eagerly, some grudgingly, some a bit dubiously, but they ate it, either in crumbs or in hunks. The Daily Advertiser declared:
No article has appeared for years that will command so general a perusal and publication. Sir John has added a stock of knowledge to the present age that will immortalize his name and place it high on the page of science.
The Mercantile Advertiser, knowing that its lofty readers were unlikely to see the moon revelations in the lowly Sun, hastened to begin reprinting the articles in full, with the remark that the document appeared to have intrinsic evidence of authenticity.
The Times, a daily then only a year old, and destined to live only eighteen months more—later, of course, the title was used by a successful daily—said that everything in the Sun story was probable and plausible, and had an “air of intense verisimilitude.”
The New York Sunday News advised the incredulous to be patient:
Our doubts and incredulity may be a wrong to the learned astronomer, and the circumstances of this wonderful discovery may be correct.
The Courier and Enquirer said nothing at all. Like the Journal of Commerce, it hated the Sun for a lucky upstart. Both of these sixpenny respectables stood silent, with their axes behind their backs. Their own readers, the Livingstons and the Stuyvesants, got not a line about the moon from the blanket sheets, but they sent down into the kitchen and borrowed the Sun from the domestics, on the shallow pretext of wishing to discover whether their employees were reading a moral newspaper—as indeed they were.
The Herald, then about four months old, said not a word about the moon story. In fact, that was a period in which it said nothing at all about any subject, for the fire of that summer had unfortunately wiped out its plant. On the very days when the moon stories appeared, Mr. Bennett stood cracking his knuckles in front of his new establishment, the basement of 202 Broadway, trying to hurry the men who were installing a double-cylinder press. Being a wise person, he advertised his progress in the Sun. It may have vexed him to see the circulation of the Sun—which he had imitated in character and price—bound higher and higher as he stood helpless.
The third instalment of the literary treasure so obligingly imported by the “medical gentleman immediately from Scotland” introduced to Sun readers new and important regions of the moon—the Vagabond Mountains, the Lake of Death, craters of extinct volcanoes twenty-eight hundred feet high, and twelve luxuriant forests divided by open plains “in which waved an ocean of verdure, and which were probably prairies like those of North America.” The details were satisfying: