Robur the Conqueror

G!

grazing fifty yards away received one of the bullets in he

the adversa

tunity to hand down their names to posterity. All we can say is that the elder was an E

t of herbage, nothing can be easier. It was on the left bank of Niagara, not far from the

stepped up to

heless, that it wa

nkee Doodle!'" replie

en one of the seconds-doubtless in the

Doodle' and 'Yankee Britann

ft bank of the Niagara on their way to Goat Island, the neutral ground between the falls. Let us leave them in the presence of the boiled eggs and traditional ham, and

ws how great was the excitement, not only in the new but also in the old world, with regard

da between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Some people had heard those notes as "Yankee Doodle," others had heard them as "Rule Britannia," and hence the quarrel between the Anglo-Saxons, which ended with the b

aut rejoicing on that sonorous instrument of

the atmosphere, a phenomenon of which neither the nature nor the cause could be explained. Today it appeared ove

p your quarters in another? But in this case the house was the terrestrial globe! There are no means of leaving that house for the moon or Mars, or Venus, or Jupiter, or any other planet of the solar system. And so of necessity we have to find out what it is that takes place, not in the infinit

kness, recording many things about it true or false, alarming and tranquillizing their readers-as the sale required-and almost dr

satisfactory answer what was the use of observatories? If astronomers, who doubled and tripled the stars a hundred thou

ey had not come across it; in the geodetic section they had had no observation; in the meteorological section there had been no record; in the calculating room they had had nothing to deal with. At any rate this confession

i this light appeared between nine and ten in the evening. At the Meteorological Observatory on the Puy de Dome the light had been observed between one and two o'clock in the morning; at Mont Ventoux in Provence it had been s

ferent places, in succession, at intervals, during some hours. Hence, whether it had been produced from many centers in the terrestrial

in agreement. Greenwich would not consent to the proposition of Oxford. Th

that, "It was an acoustical illusion!" And so they disputed. Somethin

ions; but Russia, in the person of the director of the observatory at Pulkowa, showed that both were right. It all depended

f the St. Gothard, at the St. Bernard, at the Julier, at the Simplon, at Zurich, at Somblick in the Tyrolean Alps, the

rvers made no hesitation in admitting the materiality of the phenomenon, particularly as they had seen it by day i

s and meteorologists would soon have dropped the subject altogether had not, on the night of the 26th and 27th, the observatory of Kautokeino at Finmark, in Norway, and during the night of the 28th and 29th that of Isfjord at Spitzbergen-Norwegian one and Swedish the other-found th

and Spitzbergen. But what appeared the most phenomenal about it was that the S

outh America, in Brazil, Peru, and La Plata, and in those of Australia at

ovoked. This was a Chinaman, the director of the observatory at Zi-Ka-Wey which rises in the center of a vast plateau less than thirty miles from the

non

can imagine what it was like in that portion of the n

much-disputed question the observatories of Washington in the District of Columbia, and Cambridge in Massachusetts, found themselves opposed by those of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and Ann Arbor in Michigan. The subject of their dispute was not the nature of the body observed, but the precise moment of its observation. All of them claimed to

ry academy, showed that their colleagues were wrong by an elaborate ca

he body, and that what they had seen was an aerolite. This aerolite coul

and something had assuredly been heard. In the night of the 12th and 13th of May-a very dark night-the observers at Yale College, in the Sheffield Science School

wags. "There is a French

nded by the Atlantic Iron Works Society, whose opinions in matters of as

surements of double stars. Its director declared with the utmost good faith that there had certainly been something, that a traveling body had shown itself at very

s immense-the "New York Herald"-receive

he two heirs of the Begum of Ragginahra, the French doctor Sarrasin, the city of Frankville, and the

oying Frankville, Herr Schultze launched a formidable engine, i

ously calculated, had flown off at a speed exceeding by sixteen times that of ordinary projectiles-or about four hundred and fifty m

this be the bo

York Herald!" but how about the trumpet? The

s had observed in vain. There remained only the suggestion offe

se, being described, and without any trumpet notes being heard in the atmosphere. The body then had fallen on some part of the globe where it had been di

a new series of facts which could not possibly be expl

ance of the Hudson and on the Bunker Hill monument at Boston, the Chinese at the spike of the temple of the Four Hundred Genii at Canton, the Hindus on the sixteenth terrace of the pyramid of the temple at Tanjore, the San Pietrini at the cross of St. Peter's at Rome, the English

ted with stars, and it bore