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The fact was, I should have trembled for my own power, had both Bouvart and La Martiniere got the king into their hands. With La Martiniere I knew very well I was no favourite; yet it was impossible to prevent his attendance; the king would never have fancied a prescription in which he did not concur.
Another personage was his nephew, the astronomer E. Bouvart, and a third was the noted Prussian, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, Director of the Observatory at Königsberg, who was born in 1784, and died on the seventeenth of March, 1846, only six months before the discovery of our outer planet.
The fact was, I should have trembled for my own power, had both Bouvart and La Martiniere got the king into their hands. With La Martiniere I knew very well I was no favourite; yet it was impossible to prevent his attendance; the king would never have fancied a prescription in which he did not concur.
My sister-in-law, with more self-possession, suggested the propriety of summoning Bordeu, my physician; a proposal which I at once concurred in, more especially when she informed me, that La Martiniere was already sent for, and hourly expected. "1 trust," said I, "that Bouvart knows nothing of this, for I neither approve of him as a man or a doctor."
My sister-in-law, with more self-possession, suggested the propriety of summoning Bordeu, my physician; a proposal which I at once concurred in, more especially when she informed me, that La Martiniere was already sent for, and hourly expected. "I trust," said I, "that Bouvart knows nothing of this, for I neither approve of him as a man or a doctor."
So the Greenwich observatory was not used on the line of exploration suggested by Hussey. Three years afterward, and again in 1842, Sir George received letters from the younger Bouvart, again suggesting the possibility and probability of discovering the ultra-Uranian planet. These hints were strengthened by a letter from Bessel, of Königsberg.
It would appear that the elder Bouvart, the French astronomer referred to above, was the first to suggest that the disturbances in the orbit of Uranus, throwing that planet from his pathway outward, might be and probably were to be explained by the presence in outer space of an unknown ultra-Uranian planet.
In getting a clear notion of the discovery of Neptune, several other personages are to be considered. One of these is the astronomer Alexis Bouvart, of France, who was born in Haute Savoie, in 1767, and died in June of 1843, three years before Neptune was found.
Bouvart prepared tables to show the perturbations in question, and declared his opinion that they were caused by an unknown planet beyond. No observer, however, undertook to verify this suggestion or to disprove it. Nor did Bouvart go so far as to indicate the particular part of the heavens which should be explored in order to find the undiscovered world.
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