These Glonglims, as they are called, after they have been thus imbued with intellect, are held in peculiar respect by the vulgar, and are thought to be in every way superior to those whose understandings are entire.  The laws by which two objects, so far apart, operate on each other, have been, as yet, but imperfectly developed, and the wilder their freaks, the more they are the objects of wonder and admiration.  “The science of lunarology,” he observed, “is yet in its infancy.  But in the three voyages I have made to the moon, I have acquired so many new facts, and imparted so many to the learned men of that planet, that it is, without doubt, the subject of their active speculations at this time, and will, probably, assume a regular form long before the new science of phrenology of which you tell me, and which it must, in time, supersede.  Now and then, though very rarely, the man of the earth regains the intellect he has lost; in which case his lunar counterpart returns to his former state of imbecility.  Both parties are entirely unconscious of the change—­one, of what he has lost, and the other of what he has gained.”

The Brahmin then added:  “Though our party are the only voyagers of which authentic history affords any testimony, yet it is probable, from obscure hints in some of our most ancient writings in the Sanscrit, that the voyage has been made in remote periods of antiquity; and the Lunarians have a similar tradition.  While, in the revolutions which have so changed the affairs of mankind on our globe, (and probably in its satellite,) the art has been lost, faint traces of its existence may be perceived in the opinions of the vulgar, and in many of their ordinary forms of expression.  Thus it is generally believed throughout all Asia, that the moon has an influence on the brain; and when a man is of insane mind, we call him a lunatic.  One of the curses of the common people is, ’May the moon eat up your brains;’ and in China they say of a man who has done any act of egregious folly, ‘He was gathering wool in the moon.’”

I was struck with these remarks, and told the Hermit that the language of Europe afforded the same indirect evidence of the fact he mentioned:  that my own language especially, abounded with expressions which could be explained on no other hypothesis;—­for, besides the terms “lunacy,” “lunatic,” and the supposed influence of the moon on the brain, when we see symptoms of a disordered intellect, we say the mind wanders, which evidently alludes to a part of it rambling to a distant region, as is the moon.  We say too, a man is “out of his head,” that is, his mind being in another man’s head, must of course be out of his own.  To “know no more than the man in the moon,” is a proverbial expression for ignorance, and is without meaning, unless it be considered to refer to the Glonglims.  We say that an insane man is “distracted;” by which we mean that his mind is drawn two different ways.  So also, we call a lunatic a man beside himself, which most distinctly expresses the two distinct bodies his mind now animates.  There are, moreover, many other analogous expressions, as “moonstruck,” “deranged,” “extravagant,” and some others, which, altogether, form a mass of concurring testimony that it is impossible to resist.