1. Pioneers of this subject include Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon (1948; New York: Macmillan, 1960);
2. Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
3. Scott L. Montgomery, The Moon and the Western Imagination (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1999). See also Karl S. Guthke, “Nightmare and Utopia: Extraterrestrial Worlds from Galileo to Goethe,” Early Science and Medicine 8.3 (2003), 173–195.
4. John Wilkins, The Discovery of a World in the Moone. Or, A Discourse Tending to Prove, that ‘tis probable there may be another habitable world in that planet (London, 1638), licensed by the bishop of London’s chaplain, March 29, 1638, entered in the Stationers register on 30 March; Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone: Or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales (London, 1638), registered on August 1, 1638; John Wilkins, A Discourse Concerning a New World & Another Planet (London, 1640).
5. Many of these early theorists are cited in Walter Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendon-Charltoniana: or, A Fabrick of Natural Science Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (London, 1654), and