Despite Ambrose Bierce’s sardonic treatment, the real Professor Simon Newcomb did not think much of possible lunarians. Newcomb was Bierce’s elder contemporary, a foremost American astronomer (founding president of the American Astronomical Society) and noted author on lunar motion. In 1870 he visited Europe and found a theory running rampant allowing for possibly habitable conditions on the Far Side of the Moon. He effectively crushed it.

In 1824 Franz von Paula Gruithuisen published observations of what he saw as buildings, streets, and other structures of a massive city in jumbled terrain north of crater Schröter (Figure 11.1). Despite his campaign to show other scientists these structures, few were convinced. Gruithuisen wrote more about the Moon; he is credited with first realizing that lunar craters formed largely via impacts with other objects orbiting the Sun, more than a century before Eugene Shoemaker showed it.