and awaited his comments. A little later Leverrier, the French
astronomer, completed the same problem, and waiting for no authority
beyond his own, flung his discovery out to the world with the
self-confidence of a Frenchman....

"... When the news of the discovery of Neptune reached this country, I
happened to be visiting at the observatory in Cambridge, Mass. Professor
Bond (the elder) had looked for the planet the night before I arrived at
his house, and he looked again the evening that I came.

"His observatory was then a small, round building, and in it was a small
telescope; he had drawn a map of a group of stars, one of which he
supposed was not a star, but the planet. He set the telescope to this
group, and asking his son to count the seconds, he allowed the stars to
pass by the motion of the earth across the field. If they kept the
relative distance of the night before, they were all stars; if any one
had approached or receded from the others, it was a planet; and when the
father looked at his son's record he said, 'One of those has moved, and
it is the one which I thought last night was the planet.' He looked
again at the group, and the son said, 'Father, do give me a look at the
new planet--you are the only man in America that can do it!' And then we
both looked; it looked precisely like a small star, and George and I
both asked, 'What made you think last night that it was the new planet?'
Mr. Bond could only say, 'I don't know, it looked different from the
others.'

"It is always so--you cannot get a man of genius to explain steps, he
leaps.

"After the discovery of this planet, Professor Peirce, in our own
country, declared that it was not the planet of the theory, and
therefore its discovery was a happy accident. But it seemed to me that
it was the planet of the theory, just as much if it varied a good deal
from its prescribed place as if it varied a little. So you might have
said that Uranus was not the Uranus of the theory.

"Sir John Herschel said, 'Its movements have been felt trembling along
the far-reaching line of our analysis, with a certainty hardly inferior
to ocular demonstration.' I consider it was superior to ocular
demonstration, as the action of the mind is above that of the senses.
Adams, in his study at Cambridge, England, and Leverrier in his closet
at Paris, poring over their logarithms, knew better the locus of that
outside planet than all the practical astronomers of the world pu