Subject: The Elephant on the Moon
From: "sean_b_palmer" <sean@...>
Date: 07 Apr 2006 21:29
Apparently first published in 1854, The Elephant on the Moon [1] was a satirical poem written by Samuel Butler on the state of astronomical integrity at the time. I mention it because in the course of my Will-o'-the-wisp research today, I happenstanced upon the following quote from an online transcription of a recent article from New Scientist: in 1663, Butler Hud decribed it as that which "... bewitches and leads men into pools and ditches." - Mekong Mystery, New Scientist, 6 September 1997; via [2] I'd not heard of this Butler Hud fellow before, so I Googled and found that it was a mistranscription of "Butler, /Hud./", Hud. being the abbreviation of Samuel Butler's most popular work, Hudibras. I should have figured this out sooner since Fulke was called "W. Fulke Meteors" in just the previous sentence. I've been doing a lot of work these past couple of days on Will-o'-the-wisps and the whole anomalous lights site. As I mentioned, I was preparing a transcription of a work of Rev. John Brand, and I've now published that: http://inamidst.com/lights/brand - John Brand: Will With A Wisp (1777) As well as that, I've added new references to the wisps page and a couple more quotes from The Times that I managed to find and transcribe recently--and there's plenty more to come! I went hunting for copies of Notes and Queries and found one today, though I missed a page so I should go back and get that. I also got a paper by Allan Mills, whom I mentioned recently, and his work cites many other previous works that I've subsequently been looking for, though I only found one in my relatively vast library, which was disappointing. I also looked up the old details of a random ignis fatuus story that I found a couple of years ago, and got a copy of that too. I shall be transcribing all of this since it's in the public domain or would be classed as fair dealing (the UK's kinda-equivalent to fair use). I've also been preparing a huge table of synonyms with much richer and more granular citations and other annotations, but now I've started to think that I ought to make an XML database out of it so that I can process and update the information easier, so that whole thing will probably be delayed. In more local news, I subscribed mail-archive.com to the list so now we get some alternative archives just in case Yahoo! pulls the plug here, or in case someone wants a better interface: http://mail-archive.com/mysterylights@yahoogroups.com/ It might also make the posts easier to find on Google. I've been thinking about housing some copies on inamidst.com too, but as usual I'm struggling to decide on the best structure for it. As well as all that, I ordered Night Orbs [3] from long-time list member James Bunnell, and the new Corliss book that Peter recommended to me the other day--and I got to speak briefly to the man himself in the process of ordering it. Once the database of Will-o'-the-wisp articles is of a sufficient size, I'll probably make yet another table of the most interesting characteristics, and perhaps attempt to plot a map of all of the sightings onto a map of Britain, with date information marked clearly, to see if there are any interesting trends there. There are some other axes that I'm rather interested in, but I need to do loadsa transcribin' still. I'm a bit worried about the wisp reports being thin on the ground, so if anybody knows of some that I don't have, please do feel free to send them to me! Facsimilies of original article content, especially that in the public domain, would be appreciated most of all. Cheers, Footnotes: 1 http://www.geocities.com/jswortham/elephantonmoon.html 2 http://www.geocities.com/emiryk/ForestTree/pages/myths/willwisp.html 3 http://www.nightorbs.net/ -- Sean B. Palmer http://inamidst.com/sbp/