A JOUENEY TO THE MOON. 169 



a journey up to the moon. This was by no 

 means a mere joke. He advocated the impor- 

 tant results of a commercial intercourse with 

 the lunar inhabitants, and evidently thought 

 the only difficulty in the way was a proper 

 flying machine ! Some one objected to the 

 learned bishop the little difficulty of there being 

 no baiting-houses or taverns by the way. To 

 which the bishop briskly replied, that his ob- 

 jector ought to have been the last person to 

 raise that obstacle, as few were more famous 

 than he for building castles in the air! Such 

 schemes have been far from uncommon, and on 

 the first discovery of the balloon, there were 

 great hopes that man would rise to regions to 

 which every human being- has hitherto been a 

 stranger. 



The belief of the illimitableness of the air is 

 now generally considered to have been proved 

 to be erroneous. Had these would-be aerial tra- 

 vellers made the attempt at navigating the thin 

 air, they would soon have found their sad mis- 

 take, and have discovered that an impassable 

 gulf is fixed between us and all the heavenly 

 bodies, and this gulf is the air-void region lying 

 beyond the boundaries of our atmosphere. The 

 investigations of philosophers make it appear 

 probable that the extreme limit of the atmosphere 

 does not reach beyond forty-five or fifty miles ; 



