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When an anatomist discovered an organ in a certain animal he foretold its rudimentary existence in the embryonic man, and we are told his prophecy was fulfilled through the microscope, "just as the planet Neptune was discovered after its existence had been predicted from the disturbances produced in the orbit of Uranus."
On both planets some absorption lines seem to agree with the aqueous vapour lines of our own atmosphere; while one, which is a strong band in the red common to both planets, seems to agree with a line in the spectrum of some reddish stars. Uranus and Neptune are difficult to observe spectroscopically, but appear to have peculiar spectra agreeing together.
This was, after all, the real tug of war. Many unknown quantities existed: its mass, its distance, its eccentricity, the obliquity of its orbit, its position nothing was known, in fact, about the planet except the microscopic disturbance it caused in Uranus, several thousand million miles away from it.
Yet even they admit that Zeus bound his own father Cronus, because he wickedly devoured his sons; and that Cronus, too, had punished his own father, Uranus, for a similar reason, in a nameless manner. And yet when I proceed against my father, people are angry with me. This is their inconsistent way of talking, when the gods are concerned, and when I am concerned. Here Socrates breaks in.
Now take a top and lay it on one side on the table, with one of its poles pointing toward the great lamp we used for the sun and the other pointing away. That is the way Uranus gets round his path, on his side! He rotates the wrong way round compared with the planets we have already spoken of, but he revolves the same way round the sun that all the others do.
"Not from such planets as Mercury, Venus or Mars anyhow, friend Michael," observed Barbican. "But the inhabitants of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune, if they bear the same proportion to their planet that we do ours, must certainly be regular Brobdignagians." "Let us keep severely away from all planets of the latter class then," said Ardan. "I never liked to play the part of Lilliputian myself.
Thus, if we take Mercury as ¾ inch from the sun, Venus is about 1¼ inches, the Earth 2¼, Mars 2, the planetoids 5¼, Jupiter 9¾, Saturn 14, Uranus 36, and Neptune 60 inches. On the same scale, by the way, Enckes' comet at Aphelion, its farthest distance from the sun, would be about 12 feet; Donatis almost a mile; and Alpha Centauri, a near star in the Milky Way, some ten miles.
Mariano Riego de Dios' column destined for duty in Samar was sighted by the Spanish gunboats Elcano and Uranus, which gave chase, and the former proving the faster overtook and attacked the Bulusan doing so much damage to her that she foundered after a hot engagement in which considerable damage was done to the Spaniard.
It was thus for the purpose of dividing very close double stars that Herschel increased to such an unprecedented extent the magnifying capabilities of his instruments; and to this improvement incidentally the discovery of Uranus, March 13, 1781, was due.
In 1843 John Couch Adams came out Senior Wrangler at Cambridge, and was free to undertake the research which as an undergraduate he had set himself to see whether the disturbances of Uranus could be explained by assuming a certain orbit, and position in that orbit, of a hypothetical planet even more distant than Uranus.
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