The Savannah morning news., 1901-01-06

an exposure of what he termed a hum
bug. He said that there was no such
thing and never had been any such thing
as star of Bethlehem, and if there was
such a star it could not have been dis
covered at Klein's Observatory, which
was quite true as there was no such
thing as Kleiu's Observatory, the esti-
mable hardware dealer having never
looked through anything bigger than a
pair of opera glasses in his life. Proctor )
denial of the star of Bethlehems exist
ence stirred up a hornets nest about his
ears. The pious and orthodox fell upon
him with truly religious ardor, DEFEND
ing Prof Klein and denouncing Proctor
with a Vigor which soon made the Eng
fish astronomer very sorry that he spoke.
During the summer of 1888 Mulhattan,
with the cid of a mythical Professor j. y.
B. Birdwhistle, of the equally mythical
Lawrenceburg Academy of Science, dis
covered an invisible moon, the bulk Of
which was about two and a half times
greater than that of a visible moon, while
its distance from the earth was only about
thirty thousand miles
Its influence on our tides" wrote Null
haitian, ION our atmosphere. our crops,
and the great storms must be very great,
and will in d measure account for the
cyclones. tornadoes, and hot and cold
makes its orbit in a path diagonally be-
tween the earth and SUM- in such g no
sition, caused by the suns powerful at
traction, as to be invisible except the up
per edge, as it occasionally skirts our
horizon during the months of July and
August"
Then the romancer went on to say that
Professor Birdwhstle had telegraphed the
discovery to Professor Swift of the Ro-
oh ar ~1~a fnrxr NJ TnhY ~
VI. Klein. the noted astronomer of Ken
lucky. and had received a reply from che
latter, stating that he had brought his in
struments to bear upon the western hori-
Zon al the indicated point, and that he,
too. had gazed upon the invisible moon
thus corroborating Professor B!rdwhistle
in every particular The invisible moon
careered visibly through the newspapers
for many days.
Some OF Muihattan's Wiscellanies.
Mr. Mulhattan now turned his atten-
ton to things terrestrial, and brought
to public notice an ancient pyramid mean
Lawrenceburg KY He said it was found
in one of the huge mounds there abound
ing, and was full of golden urns and
other wonderful relics of an extinct race
Later on he got up another mound sensa-
ton, in which he told how a golden calf
had been discovered, and tables Of stones
with inscriptions on them. 1t was thought
that these Were copies of the original ten
commandments. lie also wrote of great
oil wells discovered in out-of- Lhe-way-
places. and the oil men of Pennsylvania
became half crazy with excitement. Pros
pectors We're sent out to the new oil
fields, with instructions to lease land and
put up derrlcks without an instant's de-
lay
The famous story of the monkeys, told
on j. b. Parkes Of X kingston, Ky, was
an Improvement on the cotton-tending
geese. 1t was said that Mr.. Parkes hao
secured seven immense monkeys from his
brother-in-law in South Africa, and had
trained them to break hemp. The mon
keys required little care in their keeping.
and received no pay. ana did their work
so well that the farmer discharged all
his laboreIs, made arrangements to ifn>
port a thousand more monkeys. and look
Ell forward with joy and confidence to the
time when, owing to the low cost of his
labor, he should obtain a practical mon
Cpoly of the business of growing hemp,
and become one of the richest men in
the South. Then the story went on to say
that the knights of Labor of Kentucky
had become greatly excited over the at
fair; that they had denounced the impor-
tatiOn OF monkey labor from Africa, al
being infinitely worse than the importa-
ton OF pauper labor from Europe. and
that n strike of all the farm hands o,
kentucky would certainly occur. and
there might be riots and bloodshed ano
lnccndiarism. unless the Legislature pun
a stop 90 Mr. Parkes' project by prohib-
itlng monkeys. This story was sent out
by a press association. II attracted the
attention OF one of the intelligent leader
writer's of the London Telegraph, who