Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/194

188 supposed to be, but only transference of state from one hypnotic to another If you be of the masses that the astronomers have hypnotized, you will not be able even to remember. Ten pages from here, and Leverrier and the "planet Vulcan" will have fallen from your mind, like beans from a magnet, or like data of cold meteorites from the mind of a Thomson.

Leverrier and the "planet Vulcan."

And much the good it will do us to repeat.

But at least temporarily we shall have an impression of a historic fiasco, such as, in our acceptance, could occur only in a quasi-existence.

In 1859, Dr. Lescarbault, an amateur astronomer, of Orgères, France, announced that, upon March 26, of that year, he had seen a body of planetary size cross the sun. We are in a subject that is now as unholy to the present system as ever were its own subjects to the system that preceded it, or as ever were slanders against miracles to the preceding system. Nevertheless few text-books go so far as quite to disregard this tragedy. The method of the systematists is slightingly to give a few instances of the unholy, and dispose of the few. If it were desirable to them to deny that there are mountains upon this earth, they would record a few observations upon some slight eminences near Orange, N. J., but say that commuters, though estimable persons in several ways, are likely to have their observations mixed. The text-books casually mention a few of the "supposed" observations upon "Vulcan," and then pass on.

Dr. Lescarbault wrote to Leverrier, who hastened to Orgères

Because this announcement assimilated with his own calculations upon a planet between Mercury and the sun

Because this solar system itself has never attained positiveness in the aspect of Regularity: there are to Mercury, as there are to Neptune, phenomena irreconcilible with the formulas, or motions that betray influence by something else.

We are told that Leverrier "satisfied himself as to the substantial accuracy of the reported observation." The story of this investigation is told in Monthly Notices, 20-98. It seems too bad to threaten the naïve little thing with our rude sophistications, but it is amusingly of the ingenuousness of the age from which present dogmas have survived. Lescarbault wrote to Leverrier. Leverrier hastened to Orgères. But he was careful not to tell Lescarbault