ttle
worlds performing their unknown part in the vast space between the
Warrior planet and Jove.

THE STORY OF NEPTUNE.

The discovery of the planet Neptune by Dr. Galle on the twenty-third
of September, 1846, was one of the most important events in the
intellectual history of this century. Certainly it was no small thing
to find a new world. Discoverers on the surface of our globe are
immortalized by finding new lands in unknown regions. What, therefore,
should be the fame of him who finds a new world in the depths of
space? Perhaps the discoverer of an asteroid or planetary moon may
not claim, in the present advanced stage of human knowledge, to rank
among the flying evangels of history; but he who found the great
planet third in rank among the worlds of the solar system, a world
having a mass nearly seventeen times as great as that of our own, may
well be regarded as one of the immortals.

We have referred the discovery of Neptune to Dr. Johann Gottfried
Galle, the German astronomer and Professor of Natural Sciences at
Berlin. But this Dr. Galle was only the _eye_ with which the discovery
was made. He was a good eye; but the eye, however clear, is only an
organ of something greater than the eye, and that something in this
case consisted of two parts. The first part was Urbain Jean Joseph
Leverrier, the French astronomer, of the Paris Observatory. The other
part was Professor John Couch Adams, the astronomer of the University
at Cambridge, England. These two were the thinkers; that is, they
were, as it were, jointly the great mind of the age, of which Galle
was the eye.

In getting a clear notion of the discovery of Neptune, several other
personages are to be considered. One of these is the astronomer Alexis
Bouvart, of France, who was born in Haute Savoie, in 1767, and died
in June of 1843, three years before Neptune was found. Another
personage was his nephew, the astronomer E. Bouvart, and a third was
the noted Prussian, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, Director of the
Observatory at Koenigsberg, who was born in 1784, and died on the
seventeenth of March, 1846, only six months before the discovery of
our outer planet.

Still another character to be commemorated is the English astronomer
Professor James Challis, Plumian Professor and Director of the
Observatory at Cambridge, England. This contributor to the great event
was born in 1803, and died at Cambridge on the third of December,
1882. Still another, not to b