Although the admission fee was half-a-dollar, upwards of a
thousand persons were present. Without either diagrams or notes, the
accomplished lecturer kept his audience in breathless attention for
upwards of an hour. He seemed to be a devout, unassuming man, and threw
a flood of light on every subject he touched. His theme was the recent
discovery of the Leverrier planet; and perhaps you will not be
displeased if I give you a summary of his lucid observations. In
observing how the fluctuations of the planet Herschel had ultimately
led to this discovery, he said:
"For a long time no mind dared to touch the problem. At length a young
astronomer rises, unknown to fame, but with a mind capable of grasping
all the difficulties involved in any of these questions. I refer of
course to LEVERRIER. He began by taking up the movements of Mercury. He
was dissatisfied with the old computations and the old tables; and he
ventured to begin anew, and to compute an entirely new set of tables.
With these new tables, he predicted the _precise instant_ when the
planet Mercury, on the 18th of May, 1845, would touch the sun, and
sweep across it.
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