Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/500

496 the planet projected upon the sun's disk when its orbital motion carried it between us and the sun; (2) to search for it when the sky background was darkened at the time of a total solar eclipse.

Needless to say, a crop of discoverers by the first method grew up without delay. The observer of greatest note was Lescarbault, a rural physician of France. Immediately following the publication of Le Verrier's conclusions, Lescarbault announced that he had observed the transit of an unknown planet across the sun's disk several months earlier. Le Verrier journeyed to Lescarbault's home, investigated all the circumstances of the observation, weighed the evidence and concluded that a real planet had been seen. In fact, so convinced of its reality were many scientific men that the name Vulcan was given to it. Older and later reported observations of the same character, to the number of twenty, were collected by Le Verrier, and those which seemed to be in harmony with each other were made the basis of an orbit. Vulcan was found to be about one third Mercury's distance from the sun, revolving once around the sun in between nineteen and twenty days. In some of the text-books on astronomy appearing in the sixties and seventies, Vulcan was assigned a place in the solar system as conspicuous and as secure as that of Mercury itself.

Now it is probable that every one of the twenty observations referred to was erroneous, though made in good faith. In essentially every case the observer was inexperienced, and used a telescope of insufficient power, or one unprovided with measuring apparatus suitable for determining whether or not the subject observed was in motion across the sun's disk. Even the observation of Lescarbault was in doubt when it later transpired that a Brazilian observer of considerable professional experience was at the same hour studying the region of the sun in question and saw only uniform normal solar surface. The situation was not without its humorous side. For example, a Mississippi Valley weather prophet who saw Vulcan crossing the sun's disk, said it was about "as large as a new [sic] silver half dollar"! Many of the observations no doubt referred to small sun spots which, with small telescopes, would look round.

Vulcan was searched for by visual observers at the principal eclipses of the sixties, seventies and eighties. Two noted astronomers at the eclipse of 1878, Watson and Swift, believed that they saw two new planets near the sun. However, the two seen by Watson did not agree with those seen by Swift, and still other astronomers at the same eclipse saw no strange bodies in the same regions. As the assigned locations depended upon the hasty readings of graduated circles, in which one can so easily make errors, in the press and excitement of eclipse conditions, the astronomical world quickly, and no doubt