Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1855 Excerpt: ... can be imagined to gratify the spurious appetite of the credulous. It must be admitted, to the discredit of certain of our public bodies, that they have long condescended to traffic in this sort of charlatanism, and to derive a revenue from thus imposing on public credulity. If precedent, however, can be admitted as any extenuation of this practice, they may claim to have sinned in good company, for Arago relates that he had the following anecdote from Lagrange. "The Berlin Academy, so celebrated for the vastness of physical discoveries and researches which were consigned to its transactions, formerly derived its chief revenue from the circulation of its almanack. This publication from an early period included a mass of pretended predictions of meteorological phenomena and political events, like those which figure in some of our own almanacks of much more recent date. Ashamed of sanctioning the publication of such absurdities, the Academy, upon the proposition of one of its leading members, resolved at one time upon suppressing them and supplying their place with more rational and useful matter. "The immediate consequence of the reform was the almost total suspension of the revenues of the Academy by the great decrease of the sale of the almanack, so that the learned body was literally starved into compliance with the public demand, and compelled to reissue annually a collection of pretended predictions which were a subject of ridicule to those who invented and compiled them." A similar circumstance occurred with respect to Moore's Almanack, of which the sale was reduced in amount by the omission of the column which assigned the effects produced by the signs of the zodiac on human members. Another of the early almanacks which owed its immens...
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