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Since their time, however, there has been a large increase of knowledge in this branch. The discovery of the planet Neptune by Galle, as the result of mathematical calculations of Leverrier, which were made independently also by Adams, was hailed as a signal proof of scientific progress; and, recently, the discovery of a fifth satellite of Jupiter.
In reality Weismann only adduces one strict proof, and even that is only laying special stress on what is well known in comparative embryology; namely, the possibility of “predicting” on the basis of the theory of descent, as Leverrier “predicted” Neptune. For instance, in the lower vertebrates from amphibians upwards there is an os centrale in the skeleton of wrist, but there is none in man.
He held in hand the mathematical computations of that genius from October of 1845 to June of the following year, when the astronomer Leverrier, of Paris, published to the world his own tables of computation, proving that the disturbances in the orbit of Uranus were due to the influence of a planet beyond, and indicating the place where it might be found.
By a custom extending through two centuries, each astronomer was to a large extent the master of his own work. Leverrier undertook to change all this in a twinkling, and, if reports are true, without much regard to the feelings of the astronomers.
Leverrier advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way was caused by gaseous protoplasmic emanations from the field of Waterloo, which, ascending to an altitude determinable by their own specific gravity, became luminous through the development and exposure by the natural processes of animal decay of the phosphorus contained in them.
It chanced, however, that at the time when the predictions of Leverrier and Adams were sent, the one sent to Galle and the other to Challis, Uranus and the earth and the sun were in such relations that the departure of the orbit of Uranus from the place indicated by Bode's Law did not seriously displace the planet from the position which it should theoretically occupy.
So marvellous shall be the victories of science, that the perturbations of the planets in their courses shall reveal the existence of a new one more distant than Uranus, and Leverrier shall tell at what part of the heavens that star shall first be seen.
Comparing together three of these observations, Wolff found that they would be satisfied by a planet having a period of revolution of 19 days, agreeing fairly with the period of rather more than 19-1/3 days inferred by Leverrier for Lescarbault's planet.
Galle got the letter on September 23, 1846. That same evening he pointed his telescope to the place Leverrier told him, and saw the planet. He recognized it first by its appearance. To his practised eye it did seem to have a small disk, and not quite the same aspect as an ordinary star.
Nor does that process of induction and deduction by which a lady, finding a stain of a peculiar kind upon her dress, concludes that somebody has upset the inkstand thereon, differ in any way, in kind, from that by which Adams and Leverrier discovered a new planet.
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