many generations might seem incredible—though not to this generation which has itself lived through an orgy of speculation.

Clearly the South Sea Bubble, which reached its climax in 1720, was the chief source of Captain Samuel Brunt's satire, which has an important place in the minor literature called forth by the wild speculation connected with the Bubble.¹ If the "Projects" proposed to Captain Brunt² seem extreme to any modern reader, let him turn to the list of "bubbles," still accessible in many places.³ Nothing in Brunt is so fantastic as many of the actual schemes suggested and acted upon in the eighteenth century. The possibility of extracting gold from the mountains of the moon is no more fanciful than several of the proposals seriously received by Englishmen under the spell of speculation. As in the kingdom of Cacklogallinia, so in London, men mortgaged their homes and women sold their jewels ⁴ in order to purchase shares in wildcat companies, born one day, only to die the next. As the anonymous author of one of many South Sea Ballads wrote in his "Merry Remarks upon Exchange Alley Bubbles":

The meteoric rise in the price of shares in the moon-mountain project of the Cacklogallinians is no greater than the actual rise in prices of shares during the South Sea Bubble, when, between April and July, 1720, shares rose from £120 to £1,020. The fluctuating market of the Cacklogallinian 'Change, which responded to every rumor, follows faithfully the actual situation in London in 1720; and the final crash which shook Cacklogallinian foundations—subtly suggested by Brunt's unwillingness to return and face the enraged multitude—is an echo of the crash which shook England when the Bubble was pricked.

But its reflection of the economic background of the age is not the only reason for the interest and importance of A Voyage to Cacklogallinia, either in its generation or in our own. The little tale has its place in the history of science, particularly in that movement of science which, beginning with the "new astronomy" in the early seventeenth century, was to produce one of the most important chapters in the history of aviation.⁵ So far as literature is concerned, A Voyage to Cacklogallinia belongs to the literary genre of "voyages to the moon" which from Lucian to H.G. Wells (even to modern "pulp magazines") have enthralled human imagination. Yet while its fantasy looks back to Lucian's Icaro-Menippus, who flew to the moon by using the wing of a vulture and the wing of an eagle, its suggestion of the growing scientific temper of modern times makes it much more than mere fantasy. In the semilegendary history of Iran is to be found a tale, retold by Firdausi in the Shaknameh of Kavi Usan, who "essayed the sky To outsoar angels" by fastening four eagles to his throne. The Iranian motif was adopted in the romances of Alexander the Great and so passed into European literature. The researches of Leonardo da Vinci upon the muscles of birds and the principles of the flight of birds brought over to the realm of science ideas long familiar in tale and legend. Francis Bacon did not hesitate to suggest in his Natural History (Experiment 886) that there are possibilities of human flight by the use of birds and "advises others to think further upon this experiment as giving some light to the invention of the art of flying."

John Wilkins, one of the most influential early members of the Royal Society, in his Mathematicall Magick,⁶ in 1648, suggested "four several ways whereby this flying in the air hath been or may be attempted." He listed, as the second, "By the help of fowls." Ten years earlier there appeared in England during the same year two works which were to have great influence in popularizing the theme of light: Wilkins's Discovery of a World in the Moone,⁷ a serious semiscientific work on the nature of the moon and the possibility of man's flying thither, and a prose romance by Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone: or, A Discourse of a Voyage thither by D. Gonsales.⁸ These two works were largely responsible for the emergence of the old theme of flight to the moon in imaginative literature; the English translation of Lucian at almost the same time perhaps aided in advancing the popularity of the idea.

The similarities between Brunt's romance and Godwin's tale a century earlier are too striking to be fortuitous, and, indeed, there is no question that Brunt used Godwin as one of his chief sources. An earlier Robinson Crusoe, an idyllic Gulliver's Travels, Godwin's The Man in the Moone helped to establish in English literature the vogue of the traveler's tale to strange countries. Domingo, like Captain Samuel Brunt, draws from the "exotic" tradition. Both travelers find themselves in strange lands; both experience many other adventures before they make their way to the moon, drawn by birds.

But the century which elapsed between Godwin's fanciful tale and Brunt's fantastic romance felt the impact of the new science. No matter how clearly both tales draw from old traditions of legend and literature, no matter how many elements of fantasy remain, there is a profound and fundamental difference between them. Godwin's hero made his way to the moon by mere chance; it happened that he harnessed himself to his gansas during their period of hibernation. Too late, he discovered that gansas hibernate in the moon! The earlier voyage took only "Eleven or Twelve daies"—and that by gansa power! The earlier author did not suggest that his hero encountered any particular difficulties of respiration, nor did he pause to consider in detail the problem of the nature of the intervening air through which his hero passed.

But a hundred years of science had intervened between Godwin's tale and that of Captain Samuel Brunt. The later voyage to the moon is no less fantastic in its outlines than is the earlier, yet it shows clearly the impact of science upon popular imagination. The imagination of man had expanded with the expanding universe. Brunt takes care to indicate the vast distance between the earth and the moon by subtle mathematical