ry rarely done. Lashed by the phantom-scourge
of a now passing era, the world of astronomers is in a state of
terrorism, though of a highly attenuated, modernized, devitalized kind.
Let an astronomer see something that is not of the conventional,
celestial sights, or something that it is "improper" to see--his very
dignity is in danger. Some one of the corralled and scourged may stick a
smile into his back. He'll be thought of unkindly.

With a hardihood that is unusual in his world of ethereal
sensitivenesses, Russell says, of Hirst's observation:

"He found a large part of it covered with a dark shade, quite as dark as
the shadow of the earth during an eclipse of the moon."

But the climax of hardihood or impropriety or wickedness,
preposterousness or enlightenment:

"One could hardly resist the conviction that it was a shadow, yet it
could not be the shadow of any known body."

Richard Proctor was a man of some liberality. After a while we shall
have a letter, which once upon a time we'd have called delirious--don't
know that we could read such a thing now, for the first time, without
incredulous laughter--which Mr. Proctor permitted to be published in
_Knowledge_. But a dark, unknown world that could cast a shadow upon a
large part of the moon, perhaps extending far beyond the limb of the
moon; a shadow as deep as the shadow of this earth--

Too much for Mr. Proctor's politeness.

I haven't read what he said, but it seems to have been a little coarse.
Russell says that Proctor "freely used" his name in the _Echo_, of March
14, 1879, ridiculing this observation which had been made by Russell as
well as Hirst. If it hadn't been Proctor, it would have been someone
else--but one notes that the attack came out in a newspaper. There is no
discussion of this remarkable subject, no mention in any other
astronomic journal. The disregard was almost complete--but we do note
that the columns of the _Observatory_ were open to Russell to answer
Proctor.

In the answer, I note considerable intermediateness. Far back in 1879,
it would have been a beautiful positivism, if Russell had said--

"There was a shadow on the moon. Absolutely it was cast by an unknown
body."

According to our religion, if he had then given all his time to the
maintaining of this one stand, of course breaking all friendships, all
ties with his fellow astronomers, his apotheosis would have occurred,
greatly assisted by means well known to quasi-ex