That, if Leverrier had not been himself helplessly hypnotized, or if he
had had in him more than a tincture of realness, never could he have
been beguiled by such a quasi-process: but that he was hypnotized, and
so extended, or transferred, his condition to others, that upon March
22, 1877, he had this earth bristling with telescopes, with the rigid
and almost inanimate forms of astronomers behind them--
And not a blessed thing of any unusuality was seen upon that day or
succeeding days.
But that the science of Astronomy suffered the slightest in prestige?
It couldn't. The spirit of 1877 was behind it. If, in an embryo, some
cells should not live up to the phenomena of their era, the others will
sustain the scheduled appearances. Not until an embryo enters the
mammalian stage are cells of the reptilian stage false cells.
It is our acceptance that there were many equally authentic reports upon
large planetary bodies that had been seen near the sun; that, of many,
Leverrier picked out six; not then deciding that all the other
observations related to still other large, planetary bodies, but
arbitrarily, or hypnotically, disregarding--or heroically
disregarding--every one of them--that to formulate at all he had to
exclude falsely. The denouement killed him, I think. I'm not at all
inclined to place him with the Grays and Hitchcocks and Symonses. I'm
not, because, though it was rather unsportsmanlike to put the date so
far ahead, he did give a date, and he did stick to it with such a high
approximation--