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Updated: June 20, 2025
Indeed the whole place was disarranged in the strangest fashion. For a few minutes Mr. Vincey, who had entered sure of finding Mr. Bessel in his easy chair awaiting him, could scarcely believe his eyes, and stood staring helplessly at these unanticipated things. Then, full of a vague sense of calamity, he sought the porter at the entrance lodge. "Where is Mr. Bessel?" he asked.
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.
But at last he roused himself, and turned over and went to sleep again, only for the dream to return with enhanced vividness. He awoke with such a strong conviction that Mr. Bessel was in overwhelming distress and need of help that sleep was no longer possible. He was persuaded that his friend had rushed out to some dire calamity.
It was in 1823 that Bessel drew attention to discrepancies in the times of transits given by different astronomers. The quantities involved were far from insignificant. He was himself nearly a second in advance of all his contemporaries, Argelander lagging behind him as much as a second and a quarter.
Moreover, his infectious zeal communicated itself; he set the example of observing when there was scarcely an observer in Germany; and under his roof Harding and Bessel received their training as practical astronomers. But he was reserved to see evil days. Early in 1813 the French under Vandamme occupied Bremen.
He shut himself carefully into his room, lit his fire it was a gas fire with asbestos bricks and, fearing fresh dreams if he went to bed, remained bathing his injured face, or holding up books in a vain attempt to read, until dawn. Throughout that vigil he had a curious persuasion that Mr. Bessel was endeavouring to speak to him, but he would not let himself attend to any such belief.
But Aleander was not alone in his powers of speech, and others besides Parisians could listen. Butzbach tells us, not without humour, of a certain Baldwin Bessel of Haarlem, a learned physician with a wonderful memory, who was summoned to Laach to heal their Abbot, who lay sick.
The opening up of this "astronomy of the invisible" is another of the great achievements of the nineteenth century, and again it is Bessel to whom the honor of discovery is due.
Bradley has been described as the founder of the modern system of accurate observation. He died in 1762, leaving behind him thirteen folio volumes of valuable but unreduced observations. Those relating to the stars were reduced by Bessel and published in 1818, at Konigsberg, in his well-known standard work, Fundamenta Astronomiae.
A multitude of voices competed to reassure him of his safety, and then to tell him of the behaviour of the madman, as they regarded Mr. Bessel. He had suddenly appeared in the middle of the market screaming "LIFE! LIFE!" striking left and right with a blood-stained walking-stick, and dancing and shouting with laughter at each successful blow.
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