182 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 



The following supplementary note relates to the 48fft page, 



Butler's satire against the Royal Society commences in the following strain : 



" A learn'd society of late, 



The glory of a foreign state, 



Agreed, upon a summer's night, 



To search the moon by her own light, 



To take an invent'ry of all 



Her real estate and personal ; 



And make an actual survey 



Of all her lands and how they lay." 



The poem then proceeds to stale that they pointed a telescope at the moon, and saw 

 two armies engaged in desperate battle ; and finally a huge elephant, which was supposed 

 to have taken fright, and broken loose from one of the hostile armies : after several strange 

 speculations upon these phenomena, and their preparing a memoir on the spot for inser- 

 tion in the transactions of the society, a person present, who was not so deeply infected 

 with this philosophical mania, discovered that the elephant was a mouse which had insi- 

 nuated itself into the instrument. This threw the assembly into confusion, and finally 

 they agreed to " unmount the tube and open it," when lo ! the hostile armies appeared in 

 the shape of 



— " prodigious swarms 



Of flies and gnats, like men in arms." 



And the poem then concludes, 



" But when they had unscrew'd the glass, 

 To find out where th' impostor was, 

 And saw the mouse that by mishap 

 Had made the telescope a trap, 

 Amaz'd, confounded, and afflicted, 

 To be so openly convicted, 



