CHAPTER I. From Twenty Minutes Past Ten to Forty-Seven Minutes Past Ten P. M. CHAPTER II. The First Half Hour CHAPTER III. Their Place of Shelter CHAPTER IV. A Little Algebra CHAPTER V. The Cold of Space CHAPTER VI. Question and Answer CHAPTER VII. A Moment of Intoxication CHAPTER VIII.At Seventy-Eight Thousand Five Hundred and Fourteen Leagues CHAPTER IX. The Consequences of A Deviation CHAPTER X. The Observers of the Moon CHAPTER XI. Fancy and Reality CHAPTER XII. Orographic Details CHAPTER XIII. Lunar Landscapes CHAPTER XIV. The Night of Three Hundred and Fifty-Four Hours and A Half CHAPTER XV. Hyperbola or Parabola CHAPTER XVI. The Southern Hemisphere CHAPTER XVII. Tycho CHAPTER XVIII. Grave Questions CHAPTER XIX. A Struggle Against the Impossible CHAPTER XX. The Soundings of the Susquehanna CHAPTER XXI. J. T. Maston Recalled CHAPTER XXII. Recovered From the Sea CHAPTER XXIII. The End FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON CHAPTER I. THE GUN CLUB During the War of the Rebellion, a new and influential club was established in the city of Baltimore in the State of Maryland. It is well known with what energy the taste for military matters became developed among that nation of ship-owners, shopkeepers, and mechanics. Simple tradesmen jumped their counters to become extemporized captains, colonels, and generals, without having ever passed the School of Instruction at West Point; nevertheless; they quickly rivaled their compeers of the old continent, and, like them, carried off victories by dint of lavish expenditure in ammunition, money, and men. But the point in which the Americans singularly distanced the Europeans was in the science of _gunnery_. Not, indeed, that their weapons retained a higher degree of perfection than theirs, but that they exhibited unheard-of dimensions, and consequently attained hitherto unheard-of ranges. In point of grazing, plunging, oblique, or enfilading, or point-blank firing, the English, French, and Prussians have nothing to learn; but their cannon, howitzers, and mortars are mere pocket-pistols compared with the formidable engines of the American artillery. This fact need surprise no one. The Yankees, the first mechanicians in the world, are engineers—just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians—by right of birth. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than to perceive them applying their audacious ingenuity to the science of gunnery. Witness the marvels of Parrott, Dahlgren, and Rodman. The Armstrong, Palliser, and Beaulieu guns were compelled to bow before their transatlantic rivals. Now when an American has an idea, he directly seeks a second American to share it. If there be three, they elect a president and two secretaries. Given _four_, they name a keeper of records, and the office is ready for work; _five_, they convene a general meeting, and the club is fully constituted. So things were managed in Baltimore. The inventor of a new cannon associated himself with the caster and the borer. Thus was formed the nucleus of the “Gun Club.” In a single month after its formation it numbered 1,833 effective members and 30,565 corresponding members. One condition was imposed as a _sine quâ non_ upon every candidate for admission into the association, and that was the condition of having designed, or (more or less) perfected a cannon; or, in default of a cannon, at least a firearm of some description. It may, however, be mentioned that mere inventors of revolvers, fire-shooting carbines, and similar small arms, met with little consideration. Artillerists always commanded the chief place of favor. The estimation in which these gentlemen were held, according to one of the most scientific exponents of the Gun Club, was “proportional to the masses of their guns, and in the...