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Updated: June 9, 2025
Not one of those who already believed in the planet had the least doubt as to the reality of Weber's observations, and of these only Lescarbault himself received the news without pleasure.
The paradoxist was abashed, the reader perhaps imagines. Not in the least. The planet's period must have been wrongly calculated by Leverrier that was all: the real period was less than half as long as Leverrier had supposed; and instead of having gone a certain number of times round since Lescarbault had seen it, Vulcan had gone twice as many times round and half once round again.
Moreover, he was examining the very part of the sun's edge where Lescarbault saw the planet enter, at a time when it must have been twelve minutes in time upon the face of the sun, and well within the margin of the solar disc.
Leverrier at Paris received the announcement still more joyfully; while the Abbé Moigno, who gave Vulcan its name, and has always staunchly believed in the planet's existence, congratulated Lescarbault warmly upon this new view of the shamefaced Vulcan.
J. Macdonnell, at Eden, saw a "shadowy nebulous ring" surround the whole disc when ingress was two-thirds accomplished; Mr. Tornaghi, at Goulburn, perceived a halo, entire and unmistakable, at half egress. Similar observations were made at Sydney, and were renewed in 1882 by Lescarbault at Orgères, by Metzger in Java, and by Barnard at Vanderbilt University.
'One should have seen M. Lescarbault, says Moigno, 'so small, so simple, so modest, and so timid, in order to understand the emotion with which he was seized, when Leverrier, from his great height, and with that blunt intonation which he can command, thus addressed him: "It is then you, sir, who pretend to have observed the intra-mercurial planet, and who have committed the grave offence of keeping your observation secret for nine months.
If the finest telescopes cannot rediscover a planet which with the small power used by Lescarbault has a visible disc, within so limited an area of which the sun is the centre, or rather within a narrow belt of that circle, we should unhesitatingly declare that no such planet exists. But the question assumes a very different aspect when it involves moral considerations.
His professional brethren in Paris were equally solicitous to testify their regard; and MM. Felix Roubaud, Legrande, and Caffe, as delegates of the scientific press, proposed to the medical body, and to the scientific world in Paris, to invite Lescarbault to a banquet in the Hôtel du Louvre on January 18.
On December 22, 1859, a letter had been addressed by a M. Lescarbault of Orgères to Leverrier, through M. Vallée, hon. inspector-general of roads and bridges, announcing that on March 26, 1859, about four in the afternoon, Lescarbault had seen a round black spot on the face of the sun, and had watched it as it passed across like a planet in transit not with the slow motion of an ordinary sun-spot.
So confident did Le Verrier feel in the existence of such a body that an observation of a dark object in transit, by Lescarbault on 26th March, 1859, was believed by the mathematician to be the object which his theory indicated. Le Verrier also thought it likely that another transit of the same object would be seen in March, 1877.
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