2 6o NATURE STUDIES. 



appropriate wines, could be communicated by the- 

 electric wire, at least so far as the taste of the food 

 was concerned. And now they provide for us a story 

 of a still more stupendous kind. We believe, how- 

 ever, that they can claim credit in this case only for 

 preserving and exporting the concoction of American, 

 artists, the wonderful discovery having been originally 

 published in New York, though even then purporting 

 to be an Australian invention. 



It is singular how these ingenious narratives resemble' 

 each other in style and turns of expression, even when 

 they unquestionably come from different sources. The 

 writer of the clever paper called " The Lunar Hoax '* 

 must long since have joined the majority, since that 

 hoax appeared 44 years ago, and he was not a young 

 man then. But the account of the Australian dis- 

 covery might have been written by the same hand, so 

 closely does it resemble ( ' The Lunar Hoax " in manner- 

 of treatment. . To begin with, both stories contain just 

 that germ of scientific truth which is necessary to give 

 an air of probability to such inventions. In the 

 " Lunar Hoax " the optical relations on which the 

 possibility of detecting living creatures in the moon is 

 made to turn, are so dealt with that unscientific persons 

 might readily have been deceived, and, in fact, many 

 were deceived. It was said that even Arago was 

 entrapped and circulated all over Paris the wonders 

 related in the pamphlet. But there were errors in the 

 optical discussion of the subject which would have 

 saved a junior optime at Cambridge from being 



