ct an earthquake, and if there
should be no earthquake at the predicted time, that would discredit the
prophet, but data of past earthquakes would remain as good as ever they
had been. It is easy enough to smile at the illusion of a single
amateur--

The mass-formation:

Fritsche, Stark, De Cuppis, Sidebotham, Lescarbault, Lummis, Gruthinson,
De Vico, Scott, Wray, Russell, Hind, Lowe, Coumbray, Weber, Standacher,
Lichtenberg, Dangos, Hoffman, Schmidt, Lofft, Steinheibel, Pastorff--

These are only the observations conventionally listed relatively to an
Intra-Mercurial planet. They are formidable enough to prevent our being
diverted, as if it were all the dream of a lonely amateur--but they're a
mere advance-guard. From now on other data of large celestial bodies,
some dark and some reflecting light, will pass and pass and keep on
passing--

So that some of us will remember a thing or two, after the procession's
over--possibly.

Taking up only one of the listed observations--

Or our impression that the discrediting of Leverrier has nothing to do
with the acceptability of these data:

In the London _Times_, Jan. 10, 1860, is Benjamin Scott's account of his
observation:

That, in the summer of 1847, he had seen a body that had seemed to be
the size of Venus, crossing the sun. He says that, hardly believing the
evidence of his sense of sight, he had looked for someone, whose hopes
or ambitions would not make him so subject to illusion. He had told his
little son, aged five years, to look through the telescope. The child
had exclaimed that he had seen "a little balloon" crossing the sun.
Scott says that he had not had sufficient self-reliance to make public
announcement of his remarkable observation at the time, but that, in the
evening of the same day, he had told Dr. Dick, F.R.A.S., who had cited
other instances. In the _Times_, Jan. 12, 1860, is published a letter
from Richard Abbott, F.R.A.S.: that he remembered Mr. Scott's letter to
him upon this observation, at the time of the occurrence.

I suppose that, at the beginning of this chapter, one had the notion
that, by hard scratching through musty old records we might rake up
vague, more than doubtful data, distortable into what's called evidence
of unrecognized worlds or constructions of planetary size--

But the high authenticity and the support and the modernity of these of
the accursed that we are now considering--

And our acceptance that ours is a qu