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If what he showed me is not surpassed in the other rooms, I don't think much of their instruments. "M. Leverrier said he had asked M. Chacornac to meet me, but he was not there. I felt that we got on a little better, but not much, and it was evident that he did not expect me to understand an observatory. We did not ascend to the domes.
All the world now knows how Leverrier, the greatest living master of physical astronomy, and Adams, then scarce known outside Cambridge, both conceived the idea of finding the planet, not by the simple method of looking for it with a telescope, but by the mathematical analysis of the planet's disturbing influence upon known members of the solar system.
LEVERRIER. The more westerly of a pair of little ring-plains on the N. side of the Mare Imbrium, and S.W. of the Laplace promontory. It is about 10 miles in diameter, with walls rising some 1500 feet above the Mare, and more than 6000 feet above the interior, which seems to be without a central mountain or other features.
So there the matter dropped. Adams's communication was pigeonholed, and remained in seclusion eight or nine months. Meanwhile, and quite independently, something of the same sort was going on in France. A brilliant young mathematician, Urban Jean Joseph Leverrier, born in Normandy in 1811, held the post of astronomical professor at the École Polytechnique, founded by Napoleon.
His silence on the subject of what another man would have called his wrongs remained unbroken to the end of his life; and he took every opportunity of testifying his admiration for the genius of Leverrier. Personal questions, however, vanish in the magnitude of the event they relate to. By it the last lingering doubts as to the absolute exactness of the Newtonian Law were dissipated.
Leverrier himself wrote to Santiago de Chili and other places, so that, including American and European observations, the sun could be watched all through the twenty-four hours on March 21, 22, and 23.
Then Leverrier showed that the original comet associated with the November meteors was probably brought into the system by the influence of the planet Uranus in the year 126 of the Christian era.
Belief in the presence of any considerable body or bodies within the orbit of Mercury is, accordingly, at a low ebb. Yet the existence of the anomaly in the Mercurian movements indicated by Leverrier has been made only surer by further research. Its elucidation constitutes one of the "pending problems" of astronomy.
In what order Leverrier, Delaunay, Adams, and Hill should follow him, it is not necessary to decide. To many readers it will seem singular to place any name ahead of that of the master who pointed out the position of Neptune before a human eye had ever recognized it. But this achievement, great as it was, was more remarkable for its boldness and brilliancy than for its inherent difficulty.
Awhile ago I said that M. Bourget's method of truth-seeking hunting for it in out-of-the-way places was new; but that was an error. I remember that when Leverrier discovered the Milky Way, he and the other astronomers began to theorize about it in substantially the same fashion which M. Bourget employs in his seasonings about American social facts and their origin.
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