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the asteroids, or in Prof. Chases's not very careful
language, the discovery of the "asteroidal belt as deduced from Bode's
Law":
We learn that Baron Von Zach had formed a society of twenty-four
astronomers to search, in accordance with Bode's Law, for "a
planet"--and not "a group," not "an asteroidal belt"--between Jupiter
and Mars. The astronomers had organized, dividing the zodiac into
twenty-four zones, assigning each zone to an astronomer. They
searched. They found 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