Page:New lands - (IA newlands00fort).pdf/45

 that a young man of eighteen, who had not been heard of by one astronomer of his time, was an outsider. There was a transit of Venus in December, 1639, but not a grown-up astronomer in the world expected it, because the not always great and infallible Kepler had predicated the next transit of Venus for the year 1761. According to Kepler, Venus would pass below the sun in December, 1639. But there was another calculation: it was by the great, but sometimes not so great, Lansberg: that, in December, 1639, Venus would pass over the upper part of the sun. Jeremiah Horrox was an outsider. He was able to reason that, if Venus could not pass below the sun, and also over the upper part of the sun, she might take a middle course. Venus did pass over the middle part of the sun’s disc; and Horrox reported the occurrence, having watched it.

I suppose this was one of the most agreeable humiliations in the annals of busted inflations. One thinks sympathetically of the joy that went out from seventeenth-century Philistines. The story is told to this day by the Proctors and Balls and Newcombs: the way they tell this story of the boy who was able to conclude that something that could not occupy two extremes might be intermediate, and thereby see something that no professional observer of the time saw, is a triumph of absorption:

That the transit of Venus, in December, 1639, was observed by Jeremiah Horrox, “the great astronomer.”

We shall make some discoveries as we go along, and some of them will be worse thought of than others, but there is a discovery here that may be of interest: the secret of immortality that there is a mortal resistance to everything; but that the thing that can keep on incorporating, or assimilating within itself, its own mortal resistances, will live forever. By its absorptions, the science of astronomy perpetuates its inflations, but there have been instances of indigestion. See the New York Herald, Sept. 16, 1909. Here Flammarion, who probably no longer asserts any such thing, claims Dr. Cook’s “discovery of the north pole” as an “astronomical conquest.” Also there are other ways. One suspects that the treatment that Dr. Lescarbault received from Flammarion illustrates other ways.

In the year 1859, it seems that Dr. Lescarbault was some-