Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/130

 omers of all countries, and in France the planet was at once called Leverriers' planet or even "Leverrier." Sir John Herschel was the first to speak for Adams. He wrote a letter to the Athenæum in which he recalled his works at the Southampton meeting, and explained that the ground of his confidence was the near coincidence of the results of two independent investigations—that by Leverrier, and another by a young Cambridge mathematician named Adams. He invited Adams to place his calculations in full before the public; this Adams did on the 13th of November, 1846, in a memoir read before the Royal Astronomical Society.

At the time of Galle's discovery Airy was on the Continent. On returning to Greenwich he wrote to Leverrier (October 14, 1846), "I was exceedingly struck with the completeness of your investigations. May you enjoy the honors which await you! and may you undertake other work with the same skill and the same success, and receive from all the enjoyment which you merit! I do not know whether you are aware that collateral researches had been going on in England, and that they had led to precisely the same result as yours. I think it probable that I shall be called on to give an account of these. If in this I shall give praise to others, I beg that you will not consider it as at all interfering with my acknowledgment of your claims. You are to be recognized beyond doubt as the real predicter of the planet's place. I may add that the English investigations, as I believe, were not quite so extensive as yours. They were known to me earlier than yours." Leverrier naturally felt much hurt by Herschel's article and Airy's letter. He could not understand why Adams had not published his results. Other French astronomers were at first very unwilling to admit that Adams had any rights whatever in connection with the planet, but later, at the suggestion of the great French astronomer Arago, the name Neptune was adopted and has since been universally used. It was now time for Prof. Challis to publish what he knew of the matter. He gave in the Athenæum for October 17 an account of Adams' investigations, and it was then publicly known for the first time that Adams' con-