hough it was
opaque, and "eclipsed the sun," it had around it a kind of
nebulosity--or atmosphere? A penumbra would ordinarily be a datum of a
sun spot, but there are observations that indicate that this object was
at a considerable distance from the sun:

It is recorded that another observer, at Paris, watching the sun, at
this time, had not seen this object:

But that M. Croste, at Sole, about forty-five German leagues northward
from Lausanne, had seen it, describing the same spindle-form, but
disagreeing a little as to breadth. Then comes the important point: that
he and M. de Rostan did not see it upon the same part of the sun. This,
then, is parallax, and, compounded with invisibility at Paris, is great
parallax--or that, in the course of a month, in the summer of 1762, a
large, opaque, spindle-shaped body traversed the disk of the sun, but at
a great distance from the sun. The writer in the _Register_ says: "In a
word, we know of nothing to have recourse to, in the heavens, by which
to explain this phenomenon." I suppose he was not a hopeless addict to
explaining. Extraordinary--we fear he must have been a man of loose
habits in some other respects.

As to us--

Monstrator.

In the _Monthly Notices of the R.A.S._, February, 1877, Leverrier, who
never lost faith, up to the last day, gives the six observations upon an
unknown body of planetary size, that he had formulated:

Fritsche, Oct. 10, 1802; Stark, Oct. 9, 1819; De Cuppis, Oct. 30, 1839;
Sidebotham, Nov. 12, 1849; Lescarbault, March 26, 1859; Lummis, March
20, 1862.

If we weren't so accustomed to Science in its essential aspect of
Disregard, we'd be mystified and impressed, like the Editor of _Nature_,
with the formulation of these data: agreement of so many instances would
seem incredible as a coincidence: but our acceptance is that, with just
enough disregard, astronomers and fortune-tellers can formulate
anything--or we'd engage, ourselves, to formulate periodicities in the
crowds in Broadway--say that every Wednesday morning, a tall man, with
one leg and a black eye, carrying a rubber plant, passes the Singer
Building, at quarter past ten o'clock. Of course it couldn't really be
done, unless such a man did have such periodicity, but if some Wednesday
mornings it should be a small child lugging a barrel, or a fat negress
with a week's wash, by ordinary disregard that would be prediction good
enough for the kind of quasi-existence we're in.

So