Page:The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 (IA TheGreatMoonHoaxOf18351859).pdf/24

Rh nated, is a question which we can only conjecturally solve. But certain it is that the astronomer's royal patrons enjoined a masonic tacitarnity upon him and his friends until he should have officially communicated the results of his great experiment. Accordingly, the world heard nothing of him or his expedition until it was announced a few months since in the scientific journals of Germany, that Sir John Herschel, at the Cape of Good Hope, had written to the Astronomer-royal of Vienna, to inform him that the portentous comet predicted for the year 1835, which was to approach so near this trembling globe that we might hear the roaring of its fires, had turned upon another scent, and would not even shake a hair of its tail upon our hunting grounds. At a loss to conceive by what extra authority he had made so bold a declaration, the men of science in Europe who were not acquainted with his secret, regarded his "postponement," as his discovery was termed, with incredulous contumely, and continued to terrorize upon the strength of former predictions.

NEW LUNAR DISCOVERIES.

Until the 10th of January, the observations were chiefly directed to the stars in the southern signs, in which, without the aid of the hydro-oxygen reflectors, a countless number of new stars and nebulæ were discovered. But we shall defer our correspondent's account of these to future pages, for the purpose of no longer withholding from our readers the more generally and highly interesting discoveries which were made in the lunar world. And for this purpose, too, we shall defer Dr. Grant's elaborate mathematical details of the corrections which Sir John Herschel has made in the best tables of the moon's tropical, sidereal, and synodic revolutions, and of those phenomena of syzygies on which a great part of the established lunar theory depends.

It was about half-past nine o'clock on the night of the 10th, the moon having then advanced within four days of her mean libration, that the astronomer adjusted his instruments for the