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Updated: September 22, 2025
First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies, in high places, which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie too, I mean what Hesiod says that Uranus did, and how Cronus retaliated on him.
The parentage of these divinities is given with as many variations as their number. Some call them daughters of Uranus and Gæa, others of Pierus and Antiope, still others of Apollo or of Jupiter and Minerva. The analogy between the Muses and the nine maidens in the Egyptian troupe of Osiris has already been noted.
And yet there remained still the most brilliant triumph of all, the addition of another planet like Uranus, before it had ever been seen, when the analysis of Adams and Le Verrier gave a final proof of the powers of Newton's great law to explain any planetary irregularity.
The substantiation of an ice-cap at the pole will disprove the first hypothesis; for what we took for ice before alighting may have been but banks of cloud, since, having been in the plane of the planet's equator at the time, we had naturally but a very oblique view of the poles; while the absence of glacial scratches shows, I take it, that though the axis may have been a good deal more inclined than at present, it has not, at all events since Jupiter's Palaeozoic period, been as much so as that of Uranus or Venus.
At their perihelion, many of these bodies pass within the orbit of Mercury, while the aphelion of some lies without the path of Uranus. Where were they, when the body of the sun filled up the whole of the vast sphere circumscribed by the orbit of the remotest planet?
Mercury shone brightly several degrees outside the halo surrounding the Earth's black disc; and Venus was also visible; but in neither case did my observations allow me to ascertain anything that has not been already noted by astronomers. The dim form of Uranus was better defined than I had previously seen it, but no marking of any kind was perceptible.
But the old system of naming the planets after the deities of classical and pagan mythology prevailed; and to the names of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, was now added the name Uranus, that is, in the language of the Greeks, Heaven.
The mean distance of Uranus from the sun is about 1,780,000,000 miles, and its period of revolution is eighty-four years; Neptune's mean distance is about 2,800,000,000 miles, and its period of revolution is about 164 years. Uranus has four satellites, and Neptune one.
After Sir William Herschel discovered Uranus, in 1781, it was found that astronomers had observed it on many previous occasions, mistaking it for a fixed star of the sixth or seventh magnitude. Altogether, nineteen observations of Uranus's position, from the time of Flamsteed, in 1690, had been recorded. In 1790 Delambre, using all these observations, prepared tables for computing its position.
They neither belong to it nor are they in any connection with it, and hence they excite no interest in those who are dominated by it. They belong to another, a higher stage of culture, and a time that is still far off. Their course is related to that of ordinary works as the orbit of Uranus to the orbit of Mercury. For the moment they get no justice done to them.
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