c and all; and a few additional observations
confirmed the discovery.

Hereupon Sir George Airy broke out with a claim that the discovery
belonged to Adams. He was able to show that Adams had anticipated
Leverrier by a few months in his calculations; but the French scholars
were able to carry the day by showing that Adams' work had been void
of results. The world went with the French claim. Adams was left to
enjoy the fame of merit among the learned classes, but the great
public fixed upon Leverrier as the genius who did the work, and Dr.
Galle as his eye.

Several remarkable things followed in the train. It was soon
discovered that both Leverrier and Adams had been favored by chance in
indicating the field of space where Uranus was found. They had both
proceeded upon the principle expressed in Bode's Law. This law
indicated the place of Neptune as 38.8 times the distance of the earth
from the sun. A verification of the result showed that the new-found
planet was actually only thirty times as far as the earth from the
sun. In the case of all the other planets, their distances had been
remarkably co-incident with the results reached by Bode's Law; but
Uranus seemed to break that law, or at least to bend it to the point
of breaking--a result which has never to this day been explained.

It chanced, however, that at the time when the predictions of
Leverrier and Adams were sent, the one sent to Galle and the other to
Challis, Uranus and the earth and the sun were in such relations that
the departure of the orbit of Uranus from the place indicated by
Bode's Law did not seriously displace the planet from the position
which it should theoretically occupy. Thus, after a little searching,
Challis found the new world, and knew it not; Galle found it and knew
it, and tethered it to the planetary system, making it fast in the
recorded knowledge of mankind.

While Daniel O'Connell, the greatest Irishman of the present century,
despairing of the cause of his country, lay dying in Genoa, and while
Zachary Taylor, at the head of a handful of American soldiers was
cooping up the Mexican army in the old town of Monterey, a new world,
37,000 miles in diameter and seventeen times as great in mass as the
little world on which we dwell, was found slowly and sublimely making
its way around the well nigh inconceivable periphery of the solar
system!

EVOLUTION OF THE TELESCOPE.

The development of telescopic power within the present c