Punch was mocking the paper for referring to astronomical events so temporally distant from 1871, yet less than a hundred years later there was a man on the moon.
The same page complains about the use by British newspapers of two Americanisms: the "reliable" and the word "claim" in the sense of "to allege".
The presents's view of the past is often naïve, but not as naïve as the past's view of the present.