Those scientific romances were simply wild exaggerations, based
upon the thinnest foundation of scientific facts. In order,
however, to describe a journey among the stars, it was necessary
to invent some mode of locomotion in these distant regions. In
former times Lucian had been content with a ship which ascended
to the rising moon upon a waterspout; but it was now necessary to
improve upon this very primitive mode, as people began to know
something more of the forces of nature. One of the first of
these travellers in imagination to the moon in modern times was
Godwin (1638), and his plan was more ingenious than that of
Lucian. He trained a great number of the wild swans of St.
Helena to fly constantly upward toward a white object, and,
having succeeded in thus training them, one fine night he threw
himself off the Peak of Teneriffe, poised upon a piece of board,
which was borne upward to the white moon by a great team of the
gigantic swans. At the end of twelve days he arrived, according
to his story, at his destination. A little later another writer
of this peculiar kind of fiction, Wilkins, an Englishman,
professed to have made the same ascent, borne up by an eagle.
Alexandre Dumas, who recently wrote a short romance upon the same
subject, only made a translation of an English work by that
author.
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