to account for difficulties in their art. The French astronomers held to their faith in a comet moving round the sun in an orbit nearly circular. Herschel, praised everywhere as an observer "of great ardour and ingenuity," stood aside from the friendly strife. All observers were in debt to Bode, who found that a star, marked No. 964 in Mayer's catalogue, had been observed by him in 1756, had then been lost sight of, and was probably the stranger. Abbé Boscovich is said to have been the first to prove that the orbit was an ellipse; but to Lexell, Professor of Astronomy at St. Petersburg, is assigned the honour of showing that the newly found body was not a comet, but a planet, distant from the sun about nineteen times as far as the earth.[1] All with a name for science, from Laplace downward, took part in the friendly strife.
It has been said that this discovery was an accident; it has been also said that, if Herschel had not made it at the time he did, some other observer would before long have had the luck to fall in with the stranger. These criticisms are not creditable to those by whom they were made. Call it accident or chance, the fact remains that this novice, looking out for what he could find in the heavens, and with instruments improved by himself, discovered an unknown planet, and extended the boundaries of the solar system to twice the distance that had been received for thousands of years. Such accidents bring fame, and are only called luck by the envious.
One of the last-found planets of our solar system was discovered about a year ago, also by accident, but to the great honour of the discoverer. He was looking
- ↑ Robison, Edin., Phil. Trans. i. 305.
