Mr. Day was busy with the paper and its overworked press, but he gave Mr. Locke a free hand, and that scholar took to Norris & Baker, lithographers, in the Union Building, Wall Street, the drawings which had been intrusted to his care by the “medical gentleman immediately from Scotland.” Mr. Baker, described by the Sun as quite the most talented lithographic artist of the city, worked day and night on his delightful task, that the illustrations might be ready when the Sun’s press should have turned out, in the hours when it was not printing Suns, a pamphlet containing the astronomical discoveries.
“Dr. Herschel’s great work,” said the Sun, “is preparing for publication at ten guineas sterling, or fifty dollars; and we shall give all the popular substance of it for twelve or thirteen cents.” The pamphlets were to be sold two for a quarter; the lithographs at twenty-five cents for the set.
Most newspapers that mentioned the discovery of human creatures on the moon were credulous. The Evening Post, edited by William Cullen Bryant and Fitz-Greene Halleck—“the chanting cherubs of the Post,” as Colonel Webb was wont to call them—only skirted the edge of doubt:
That there should be winged people in the moon does not strike us as more wonderful than the existence of such a race of beings on earth; and that there does or did exist such a race rests on the evidence of that most veracious of voyagers, Peter Wilkins, whose celebrated work not only gives an account of the general appearance and habits of a most interesting tribe of flying Indians, but also of those more delicate and engaging 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.
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.