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Updated: June 20, 2025
He is quite sure that on November 20, the last preceding clear evening, the star was not there. He sent news of the discovery forthwith to Leverrier, the chief of the Paris observatory; and the observers there set to work to analyse the light of the stranger. Unfortunately the star's suddenly acquired brilliancy rapidly faded.
But neither did Adams and Leverrier, measuring the heavens, and calculating through years of labour the delicate interstellar forces, know that each had simultaneously caught Neptune in their net of stars three thousand million miles away. Had they been 'out, these two big, patient astronomers, they might have realised that they really worked in concert every night.
But when the first of these two meetings takes place very near the node, giving a nearly central transit, the second falls too far from it, and the planet escapes projection on the sun. The parallax 8·95" derived by Leverrier from the above-described inequality in the earth's motion, was corrected by Stone to 8·91". Month.
'With a grace and dignity full of kindness, says a contemporary narrative of these events, 'he congratulated Lescarbault on the important discovery which he had made. Anxious to obtain some mark of respect for the discoverer of Vulcan, Leverrier made inquiry concerning his private character, and learned from the village curé, the juge de paix, and other functionaries, that he was a skilful physician and a worthy man.
It was on January 2, 1860, that Leverrier thus wrote.
You may accept the fact as natural, that Zwingli and Luther, without knowing each other, preached the same reformed gospel; that Newton, and Hooke, and Halley, and Wren arrived independently of each other at the great law of the diminution of gravity with the square of the distance; that Leverrier and Adams felt their hands meeting, as it were, as they stretched them into the outer darkness beyond the orbit of Uranus, in search of the dim, unseen Planet; that Fulton and Bell, that Wheatstone and Morse, that Daguerre and Niepce, were moving almost simultaneously in parallel paths to the same end.
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.
A pleasant incident occurred in 1884, when the office was honored by a visit from Professor John C. Adams of England, the man who, independently of Leverrier, had computed the place of Neptune, but failed to receive the lion's share of the honor because it happened to be the computations of the Frenchman and not his which led immediately to the discovery of the planet.
The safety-lamp was a coincident invention, made about the same time by Sir Humphry Davy and George Stephenson; and perhaps a still more remarkable instance of a coincident discovery was that of the planet Neptune by Leverrier at Paris, and by Adams at Cambridge.
For millions of stars can be determined by its means, from their imprinted images, with an accuracy comparable to that attainable by direct meridian observations. One of the most ardent promoters of the scheme it may be expected to realise was Admiral Mouchez, the successor of Leverrier in the direction of the Paris Observatory. But it was not granted to him to see the fruition of his efforts.
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