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. At all events, a deputation from that college hurried to the steamboat and came to New York to see the wonderful supplement. The collegians saw Mr. Day, and voiced their desire.
“Surely,” he replied, “you do not doubt that we have the supplement in our possession? I suppose the magazine is somewhere up-stairs, but I consider it almost an insult that you should ask to see it.”
On their way out the Yale men heard, perhaps from the “devil,” that one Locke was interested in the matter of the moon, that he had handled the supplement, and that he was to be seen at the foot of the stairs, smoking his cigar and gazing across City Hall Park. They advanced upon him, and he, less brusque than Mr. Day, told the scientific pilgrims that the supplement was in the hands of a printer in William Street—giving the name and address.
As the Yale men disappeared in the direction of the printery, Locke started for the same goal, and more rapidly. When the Yalensians arrived, the printer, primed by Locke, told them that the precious pamphlet had just been sent to another shop, where certain proof-reading was to be done. And so they went from post to pillar until the hour came for their return to New Haven. It would not do to linger in New York, for Professors Denison Olmsted and Elias Loomis were that very day getting their first peep at Halley’s comet, about to make the regular appearance with which it favours the earth every seventy-six years.
But Yale was not the only part of intellectual New England to be deeply interested in the moon and its bat-men. The Gazette of Hampshire, Massachusetts, insisted that Edward Everett, who was then running for Governor, had these astronomical discoveries in mind when he declared that “we know not how soon the mind, in its researches into the labyrinth of nature, would grasp some clue which would lead to a new universe and change the aspect of the world.”
Harriet Martineau, who was touring America at the time, wrote in her “Sketches of Western Travel” that the ladies of Springfield, Massachusetts, subscribed to a fund to send missionaries to the benighted luminary. When the Sun articles reached Paris, they were at once translated into illustrated pamphlets, and the caricaturists of the Paris newspapers drew pictures of the man-bats going through the streets singing “Au Clair de la Lune.” London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow made haste to issue editions of the work.
Meanwhile, of course, Sir John Herschel was busy with his telescope at the Cape, all unaware of his expanded fame in the north. Caleb Weeks, of Jamaica, Long Island, the Adam Forepaugh of his day, was setting out for South Africa to get a supply of giraffes for his menagerie, and he had the honour of laying in the great astronomer’s hand a clean copy of the pamphlet. To say that Sir John was amazed at the Sun’s enterprise would be putting it mildly. When he had read the story through, he went to Caleb Weeks and said that he was overcome; that he never could hope to live up to the fame that had been heaped upon him.
In New York, meanwhile, Richard Adams Locke had spilled the beans. There was a reporter named Finn, once employed by the Sun, but later a scribe for the Journal of Commerce. He and Locke were friends. One afternoon Gerard Hallock, who was David Hale’s partner in the proprietorship of the Journal of Commerce, called Finn to his office and told him to get extra copies of the Sun containing the moon story, as the Journal had decided, in justice to its readers, that it must reprint it.