A Voyage to the Moon

m that Country, of

m; and of the D

gain in company of above Seven or Eight hundred of the same kind, who beset me. When I could discern them at a near distance, I perceived that they were proportioned and shaped like us. This adventure brought into my mind the old Wives Tales of my Nurse concerning Syrenes, Faunes and Satyrs: Ever now and then they raised such furious Shouts, occasioned undoubtedly by their Adm

rms, they should both make use of them alike. And, indeed, reflecting upon that since, that scituation of Body did not seem to me altogether extravagant; when I called to mind, that whilst Children are still under the nurture of Nature, they go upon all four

rates, that they were consulting what sort of a thing I could be. When they had conferred together a long while, a certain Burgher, who had the keeping of the strange Beasts, besought the Mayor and Aldermen to commit me to his Custody, till the Queen should send for me to co

speak in that Country as they do in our World. He put some Questions to me, which I answered, and then gave him a full account of my whole design, and the success of my Travels: He took the pains to comfort me, and, as I take it, said to me: "Well, Son, at length you suffer for the frailties of yo

on of S

lost all the Pleasure that formerly we had had in instructing them: Not but that you have heard Men talk of us; for they called us Oracles, Nymphs, Geniuses, Fairies, Houshold-Gods, Lemmes,[3] Larves[4] Lamiers,[5] Hobgoblins, Nayades, Incubusses, Shades, Manes, Visions and Apparitions: We abandoned your World, in the Reign of Augustus, not long after I had appeared to Drusus the Son of Livia, who waged War in Germany, whom I forbid to proceed any farther. It is not long since I came from thence a second time; within these Hundred Years I had a Commission to Travel thither: I roamed a great deal in Europe, and conversed with some, whom possibly you may have known. One Day, amongst others, I appeared to Cardan,[6] as he was at his Study; I taught him a great many things, and he in acknowledgment promised me to inform Posterity of w

Grandees of your States to know the virtue which in him has its Throne, and not to adore him: That I may give you an Abridgement of his Panegyrick, he is all Wit, all Heart, and possesses all the Qualities, of which one alone was heretofore sufficient to make an Heroe: It was Tristan the Hermite.[17] The Truth is, I must tell you, when I perceived so exalted a Virtue I mistrusted it would not be taken notice of, and therefore I endeavoured to make him accept Three Vials, the first filled with the O

ds. For my own part, I was commanded to go to yours; being declared Chief of the Colony that accompanyed me. I came since into this World, for the Reasons I told you; and that which makes me continue here, is, because the Men are great lovers of Truth; and have no Pedants among them; that the Philosophers are never perswaded but b

World; yet the Sun is many times over stocked, because the People bei

and Years, and you at the end of Fifty; yet know, that as there are not so many Stones as clods of Earth, nor so many Animals as Plants, nor so many M

Bodies proportionated to what our Senses are able to know; and that, without doubt, that was the reason why many have taken the Stories that are told of them for the Delusions of a weak Fancy, because they only appeared in the night time: He told me withal, That seeing they were necessitated to piece together the Bodies they were to make use of, in great haste, many times they h

ll; but that Consequence[22] is absurd, and it is an argument, that there are a Million of things, perhaps, in the Universe, that would require a Million of different Organs in you to understand them. For instance, I by my Senses know the cause of the Sympathy that is betwixt the Load-stone and the Pole, of the ebbing and flowing of the Sea, and what becomes of the Animal after Death; you cannot reach these high Conceptions but by Faith, because they are Secrets abov

not, and which they took to be an inarticulated Grunting: He therefore fell to pulling my Rope afresh to make me leap and skip, till the S

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female demon

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t ... but, in his treatise De Rerum Varietate, he ingenuously declares that he had never had any other

ilosopher, astrologer, and alchemist. Cyrano intro

Spanheim; a man of universal scholarship, and an

physician and astrologer of

n the first half of the seventeenth century. It was supposed to have been founded early in

hy was much admired by Cyrano, since he rejected the Aristotelism of the schools, advocated empiricism a

s Voyage to the Sun, where he is Cyrano's compa

principal work,

free-thinker, in literature a disciple of Montaigne. He nevertheless concealed his scepticism in philosophy, even in his chief work, the Doutes sceptiques, under a preten

f. p 2

slator has mistaken a

e contemporary with Corneille's Cid, marks him as a predecessor of Racine in method and manner. He is also t

614-1620 in England, on account of a

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