New Lands | Page 5

not one asteroid. Seven or eight hundred are now known.
Philosophical Magazine, 12-62:
That Piazzi, the discoverer of the first asteroid, had not been searching for a hypothetic body, as deduced from Bode's Law, but, upon an investigation of his own, had been charting stars in the constellation Taurus, night of Jan. 1, 1801. He noticed a light that he thought had moved, and, with his mind a blank, so far as asteroids and brilliant deductions were concerned, announced that he had discovered a comet.
As an instance of the crafty way in which some astronomers now tell the story, see Sir Robert Ball's The Story of the Heavens, p. 230:
The organization of astronomers of Lilienthal, but never a hint that Piazzi was not one of them--"the search for a small planet was soon rewarded by a success that has rendered the evening of the first day of the nineteenth century memorable in astronomy." Ball tells of Piazzi's charting of the stars, and makes it appear that Piazzi had charted stars as a means of finding asteroids deductively, rewarded soon by success, whereas Piazzi had never heard of such a search, and did not know an asteroid when he saw one. "This laborious and accomplished astronomer had organized an ingenious system of exploring the heavens, which was eminently calculated to discriminate a planet among the starry host...at length he was rewarded by a success which amply compensated him for all his toil."
Prof. Chase--these two great instances not of mere discovery, but of discovery by means of calculation according to him--now the subject of his supposition that he, too, could calculate triumphantly--the verification depended upon the accuracy of Prof. Swift and Prof. Watson in recording the positions of the bodies that they had announced--
Sidereal Messenger, 6-84:
Prof. Colbert, Superintendent of the Dearborn Observatory, leader of the party of which Prof. Swift was a member, says that the observations by Swift and Watson agreed, because Swift had made his observations agree with Watson's. The accusation is not that Swift had falsely announced a discovery of two unknown bodies, but that his precise determining of positions had occurred after Watson's determinations had been published. The accusation is not that Swift had falsely announced a discovery of two unknown bodies, but that his precise determining of positions had occurred after Watson's determinations had been published.
Popular Astronomy, 7-13:
Prof. Asaph Hall writes that, several days after the eclipse, Prof. Watson told him that he had seen "a" luminous body near the sun and that his declaration that he had seen two unknown bodies was not made until after Swift had been heard from.
Perched upon two delusions, Prof. Chase crowed his false raptures. The unknown bodies, whether they had ever been in the orbit of his calculations or not, were never seen again.
So it is our expression that hosts of astronomers calculate, and calculation-mad, calculate and calculate and calculate, and that when one of them does point within 600,000,000 miles (by conventional measurements) of something that is found, he is the Leverrier of the text books; that the others are the Prof. Chases not of the text books.
As to most of us, the symbols of the infinitesimal calculus humble independent thinking into the conviction that used to be enforced by drops of blood from a statue. In the farrago and conflicts of daily lives, it is relief to feel such a rapport with finality, in a religious sense, or in a mathematical sense. So then, if the seeming of exactness in Astronomy be either infamously, or carelessly and laughingly, brought about by the connivances of which Swift and Watson were accused, and if the prestige of Astronomy be founded upon nothing but huge capital letters and exclamation points, or upon the disproportionality of balancing one Leverrier against hundreds of Chases, it may not be better that we should know this, if then to those of us who, in the religious sense, have nothing to depend upon, comes deprivation of even this last, lingering seeming of foundation, or seeming existence of exactness and realness, somewhere--
Except--that, if there be nearby lands in the sky and beings from foreign worlds that visit this earth, that is a great subject, and the trash that is clogging an epoch must be cleared away.
We have had a little sermon upon the insecurity of human triumphs, and, having brought it to a climax, now seems to be the time to stop; but there is still an involved "triumph" and I'd not like to have inefficiency, as well as probably everything else, charged against us--
The Discovery of Uranus.
We mention this stimulus to the text-book writers' ecstasies, because out of phenomena of the planet Uranus, the "Neptune-triumph" developed. For Richard Proctor's reasons for arguing that this discovery was not accidental, see Old and New Astronomy, p.646. Philosophical Transactions, 71-492--a paper