he dilatory proceedings at Greenwich and
Cambridge had inflicted upon him, with quiet heroism. His silence on the
subject of what another man would have called his wrongs remained
unbroken to the end of his life;[222] 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. Recondite analytical methods
received a confirmation brilliant and intelligible even to the minds of
the vulgar, and emerged from the patient solitude of the study to enjoy
an hour of clamorous triumph. For ever invisible to the unaided eye of
man, a sister-globe to our earth was shown to circulate, in perpetual
frozen exile, at thirty times its distance from the sun. Nay, the
possibility was made apparent that the limits of our system were not
even thus reached, but that yet profounder abysses of space might
shelter obedient, though little favoured, members of the solar family,
by future astronomers to be recognised through the sympathetic
thrillings of Neptune, even as Neptune himself was recognised through
the tell-tale deviations of Uranus.

It is curious to find that the fruit of Adams's and Leverrier's
laborious investigations had been accidentally all but snatched half a
century before it was ripe to be gathered. On the 8th, and again on the
10th of May, 1795, Lalande noted the position of Neptune as that of a
fixed star, but perceiving that the two observations did not agree, he
suppressed the first as erroneous, and pursued the inquiry no further.
An immortality which he would have been the last to despise hung in the
balance; the feather-weight of his carelessness, however, kicked the
beam, and the discovery was reserved to be more hardly won by later
comers.

Bode's Law did good service in the quest for a trans-Uranian planet by
affording ground for a probable assumption as to its distance. A
starting-point for approximation was provided by it; but it was soon
found to be considerably at fault. Even Uranus is about 36 millions of
miles nearer to the sun than the order of progression requires; and
Neptune's vast distance of 2,800 million should be increased by no less
than 800 million miles, and its period of 165 lengthened out to 225
years,[223] in order to bring it into conformity with the curious and
unexplained rule which pl