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The latter did begin the work of exploration, and presently saw the planet. But he failed to recognize it! There it was; but the observer passed it over as a fixed star. As for Leverrier, he sent his calculations to Dr. Galle, of Berlin; and that great observer began his search. On the night of the twenty-third of September, 1846, he not only saw but caught the far-off world.
Those who have the reputation of being the profoundest thinkers and delvers in the newly-discovered realm of Force-correlation in Europe, and who have more or less modestly contributed to that reputation themselves, have evidently thought to eclipse, if not to entirely throw into the shade, the great exploit of Leverrier, in pointing out the exact place in their empirical heavens where the superior optics of some future observer shall behold, in all its glory, this "undiscovered correlative of force," which they have indicated as lying within the higher possibilities and potentialities of matter.
A telescopic comet with a period of 7-1/2 years, discovered November 22, 1843, by M. Faye of the Paris Observatory, formed the subject of a characteristically patient and profound inquiry on the part of Leverrier, designed to test its suggested identity with Lexell's comet of 1770.
The general predication of a trans-Uranian planet was made by Bessel, the great Konigsberg astronomer, in 1840; the analysis that revealed its exact location was undertaken, half a decade later, by two independent workers John Couch Adams, just graduated senior wrangler at Cambridge, England, and U. J. J. Leverrier, the leading French mathematician of his generation.
In fact, though they could not see it, they knew it must be there, just as Adams and Leverrier knew of the existence of Neptune, before ever they had seen him, by the irregularities in the movements of Uranus. As the results showed, it was there, and was comparable in size to the twin suns it influenced, and yet they could not see it.
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.
Leverrier Reception at Leverrier's Rooms in observatory Rome Impressions Apartments in Rome and Paris Customs Holy week Vespers at St. Peter's Women Frederika Bremer Paul Akers Harriet Hosmer Collegio Romano Father Secchi Galileo Visit to the Roman observatory Permission from Cardinal Antonelli Spectroscope Mrs. Somerville Berlin Humboldt Mrs. Mitchell's illness and death Removal to Lynn, Mass.
Learned and sagacious scholars have conjectured the existence of facts, where a gap in recorded history "the logic of events" seemed to presuppose them; and later discoveries have verified the guess. This is analogous to the success of Leverrier and Adams in inferring the existence of an unknown planet, which the telescope afterwards discovered.
Thus, two wholly independent methods the trigonometrical, or method by survey, and the gravitational, or method by perturbation seemed to corroborate each the upshot of the use of the other until the nineteenth century was well past its meridian. It is singular how often errors conspire to lead conviction astray. Hansen's note of alarm in 1854 was echoed by Leverrier in 1858.
So, to draw an example from science itself, when Leverrier projected in imagination the planet Uranus, he incarnated in matter a whole group of universal qualities and relations, all that go to make up a world, and in so doing he created as the poet creates; there was as much of truth, too, in his imagined world before he found the actual planet as there was of reality in the planet itself after it swam into his ken.
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