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At the very time when Lescarbault was watching the black spot on the sun's face, Liais was examining the sun with a telescope of much greater magnifying power, and saw no such spot.
As the writer in the 'North British Review' remarks, 'twelve minutes is so short a time that it is just possible that the planet may not have entered upon the sun during the time that Liais observed it. The second and third arguments are stronger. In fact, I do not see how they can be resisted.
M. Liais, having had the opportunity of applying a method, which he had devised for measuring the height of aurorae boreales, to an aurora seen at Cherbourg Oct. 31, 1853, found that the arc of the aurora was about two and a half miles above the ground, at its lower edge.
But it has never since been seen. M. Liais, director of the Brazilian Coast Survey, thought himself justified in asserting that it never had been seen. Observing the sun for twelve minutes after the supposed ingress recorded at Orgères, he noted those particular regions of its surface as "très uniformes d'intensité."
To Ponton d'Amecourt, La Landelle, Nadar, De Luzy, De Louvrie, Liais, Beleguir, Moreau, the brothers Richard, Babinet, Jobert, Du Temple, Salives, Penaud, De Villeneuve, Gauchot and Tatin, Michael Loup, Edison, Planavergne, and so many others, belongs the honor of having brought forward ideas of such simplicity. Abandoned and resumed times without number, they are sure, some day to triumph.
All we can say is that Liais was not likely to have overlooked Lescarbault's planet had it been there; and we must combine this probability against Vulcan's existence with arguments derived from other considerations. There is also the possibility of an error in time.
Analogous symptoms of a loose state of aggregation have of late been not unfrequently detected in telescopic comets, besides the instances of actual division offered by those connected with the names of Biela and Liais. The forces concerned in producing these effects seem to have been peculiarly energetic in the great comet of 1882.
Hind's calculations showed that we were not so much near as actually within its folds at that very time. Already M. Liais, from his observations at Rio de Janeiro, June 11 to 14, and Mr.
M. Liais, a French astronomer of considerable skill, formerly of the Paris Observatory, but at the time of Lescarbault's achievement in the service of the Brazilian Government, published a paper, 'Sur la Nouvelle Planète annoncée par M. Lescarbault, in which he endeavoured to establish the four following points: First, the observation of Lescarbault was never made.
It seems at a first view utterly impossible that Liais, examining with a more powerful telescope the region where Lescarbault saw the spot, could have failed to see it had it been there; but experience shows that it is not impossible for an observer engaged in examining phenomena of one class to overlook a phenomenon of another class, even when glaringly obvious.
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