“There is not one of you, brave colleagues, who has not seen the moon, or, at least, heard of It.  Do not be astonished if I wish to speak to you about the Queen of Night.  It is, perhaps, our lot to be the Columbuses of this unknown world.  Understand me, and second me as much as you can, I will lead you to its conquest, and its name shall be joined to those of the thirty-six States that form the grand country of the Union!”

“Hurrah for the moon!” cried the Gun Club with one voice.

“The moon has been much studied,” resumed Barbicane; “its mass, density, weight, volume, constitution, movements, distance, the part it plays in the solar world, are all perfectly determined; selenographic maps have been drawn with a perfection that equals, if it does not surpass, those of terrestrial maps; photography has given to our satellite proofs of incomparable beauty—­in a word, all that the sciences of mathematics, astronomy, geology, and optics can teach is known about the moon; but until now no direct communication with it has ever been established.”

A violent movement of interest and surprise welcomed this sentence of the orator.

“Allow me,” he resumed, “to recall to you in few words how certain ardent minds, embarked upon imaginary journeys, pretended to have penetrated the secrets of our satellite.  In the seventeenth century a certain David Fabricius boasted of having seen the inhabitants of the moon with his own eyes.  In 1649 a Frenchman, Jean Baudoin, published his Journey to the Moon by Dominique Gonzales, Spanish Adventurer.  At the same epoch Cyrano de Bergerac published the celebrated expedition that had so much success in France.  Later on, another Frenchman (that nation took a great deal of notice of the moon), named Fontenelle, wrote his Plurality of Worlds, a masterpiece of his time; but science in its progress crushes even masterpieces!  About 1835, a pamphlet, translated from the New York American, related that Sir John Herschel, sent to the Cape of Good Hope, there to make astronomical observations, had, by means of a telescope, perfected by interior lighting, brought the moon to within a distance of eighty yards.  Then he distinctly perceived caverns in which lived hippopotami, green mountains with golden borders, sheep with ivory horns, white deer, and inhabitants with membraneous wings like those of bats.  This treatise, the work of an American named Locke, had a very great success.  But it was soon found out that it was a scientific mystification, and Frenchmen were the first to laugh at it.”

“Laugh at an American!” cried J.T.  Maston; “but that’s a casus belli!”

“Be comforted, my worthy friend; before Frenchmen laughed they were completely taken in by our countryman.  To terminate this rapid history, I may add that a certain Hans Pfaal, of Rotterdam, went up in a balloon filled with a gas made from azote, thirty-seven times lighter than hydrogen, and reached the moon after a journey of nineteen days.  This journey, like the preceding attempts, was purely imaginary, but it was the work of a popular American writer of a strange and contemplative genius.  I have named Edgar Poe!”