Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 онлайн

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That there should be winged people in the moon does not strike us as more wonderful than the existence of such a race of beings on earth; and that there does or did exist such a race rests on the evidence of that most veracious of voyagers, Peter Wilkins, whose celebrated work not only gives an account of the general appearance and habits of a most interesting tribe of flying Indians, but also of those more delicate and engaging traits which the author was enabled to discover by reason of the conjugal relations he entered into with one of the females of the winged tribe.

Peter Wilkins was the hero of Robert Paltock’s imaginative book, “The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man,” published in London in 1750. Paltock’s winged people, said Southey, were “the most beautiful creatures of imagination that were ever devised.”

The instalment of the discoveries printed on August 29 revealed to the reader the great Temple of the Moon, built of polished sapphire, with a roof of some yellow metal, supported by columns seventy feet high and six feet in diameter: