Smugness and falseness and sequences of re-adjusting fatalities—and yet
so great is the hypnotic power of astronomic science that it can outlive
its “mortal” blows by the simple process of forgetting them, and, in
general, simply by denying that it can make mistakes. Upon page 245,
_Old and New Astronomy_, Richard Proctor says—“The ideas of astronomers
in these questions of distance have not changed, and, in the present
position of astronomy, based (in such respects) on absolute
demonstration, they can not change.”
Sounds that have roared in the sky, and their vibrations have shaken
down villages—if these be the voices of Development, commanding that
opinions shall change, we shall learn what will become of the Proctors
and their “absolute demonstrations.” Lights that have appeared in the
sky—that they are gleams upon the armament of Marching Organization.
“There can be only one explanation of meteors”—I think it is that they
are shining spear-points of slayers of dogmas. I point to the sky over a
little town in Perthshire, Scotland—there may be a new San Salvador—it
may be a new Plymouth Rock. I point to the crater Aristarchus, of the
moon—there, for more than a century, a lighthouse may have been
signalling. Whether out of profound meditations, or farrago and
bewilderment, I point, directly, or miscellaneously, and, if only a few
of a multitude of data be accepted, unformulable perturbations rack an
absolute sureness, and the coils of our little horizons relax their
constrictions.
I indicate that, in these pages, which are banners in a cosmic
procession, I do feel a sense of responsibility, but how to maintain any
great seriousness I do not know, because still is our subject
astronomical “triumphs.”
Once upon a time there was a young man, aged eighteen, whose name was
Jeremiah Horrox. He was no astronomer. He was interested in astronomic
subjects, but it may be that we shall agree that a young man of
eighteen, who had not been heard of by one astronomer of his time, was
an outsider. There was a transit of Venus in December, 1639, but not a
grown-up astronomer in the world expected it, because the not always
great and infallible Kepler had predicated the next transit of Venus for
the year 1761. According to Kepler, Venus would pass below the sun in
December, 1639. But there was another calculation: it was by the great,
but sometimes not so great, Lansberg: that, in December, 1639, Venus
would pass over the upper part of the sun. Jeremiah Horrox was an
outsider. He was able to reason that, if Venus could not pass below the
sun, and also over the upper part of the sun, she might take a middle
course. Venus did pass over the middle part of the sun’s disc; and
Horrox reported the occurrence, having watched it.
I suppose this was one of the most agreeable humiliations in the annals
of busted inflations. One thinks sympathetically of the joy that went
out from seventeenth-century Philistines. The story is told to this day
by the Proctors and Balls and Newcombs: the way they tell this story of
the boy who was able to conclude that something that could not occupy
two extremes might be intermediate, and thereby see something that no
professional observer of the time saw, is a triumph of absorption:
That the transit of Venus, in December, 1639, was observed by Jeremiah
Horrox, “the great astronomer.”
We shall make some discoveries as we go along, and some of them will be
worse thought of than others, but there is a discovery here that may be
of interest: the secret of immortality—that there is a mortal resistance
to everything; but that the thing that can keep on incorporating, or
assimilating within itself, its own mortal resistances, will live
forever. By its absorptions, the science of astronomy perpetuates its
inflations, but there have been instances of indigestion. See the New
York _Herald_, Sept. 16, 1909. Here Flammarion, who probably no longer
asserts any such thing, claims Dr. Cook’s “discovery of the north pole”
as an “astronomical conquest.” Also there are other ways. One suspects
that the treatment that Dr. Lescarbault received from Flammarion
illustrates other ways.
In the year 1859, it seems that Dr. Lescarbault was something of an
astronomer. It seems that as far back as that he may have known a planet
when he saw one, because, in an interview, he convinced Leverrier that
he did know a planet when he saw one. He had at least heard of the
planet Venus, because in the year 1882 he published a paper upon
indications that Venus has an atmosphere. Largely because of an
observation, or an announcement, of his, occurred the climax of
Leverrier’s fiascos: prediction of an intra-Mercurial planet that did
not appear when it “should” appear. My suspicion is that astronomers
pardonably, but frailly, had it in for Lescarbault, and that in the year
1891 came an occurrence that one of them made an opportunity. Early in
the year 1891. Dr. Lescarbault announced that, upon the night of Jan.
11, 1891, he had seen a new star. At the next meeting of the French
Academy, Flammarion rose, spoke briefly, and sat down without
over-doing. He said that Lescarbault had “discovered” Saturn.
If a navigator of at least thirty years’ experience should announce that
he had discovered an island, and if that island should turn out to be
Bermuda, he would pair with Lescarbault—as Flammarion made Lescarbault
appear. Even though I am a writer upon astronomical subjects, myself, I
think that even I should know Saturn, if I should see him, at least in
such a period as the year 1891, when the rings were visible. It is
perhaps an incredible mistake. However, it will be agreeable to some of
us to find that astronomers have committed just such almost incredible
mistakes—
In _Cosmos_, n. s., 42-467, is a list of astronomers who reported
“unknown” dark bodies that they had seen crossing the disc of the sun:
La Concha Montevideo Nov. 5, 1789;
Keyser Amsterdam Nov. 9, 1802;
Fisher Lisbon May 5, 1832;
Houzeau Brussels May 8, 1845.
According to the _Nautical Almanac_, the planet Mercury did cross the
disc of the sun upon these dates.
It is either that the Flammarions do so punish those who see the new and
the undesired, or that astronomers do “discover” Saturn, and do not know
Mercury when they see him—and that Buckle overlooked something when he
wrote that only the science of history attracts inferior minds often not
fit even for clergymen.
Whatever we think of Flammarion, we admire his deftness. But we shall
have an English instance of the ways in which Astronomy maintains itself
and controls those who say that they see that which they “should” not
see, which does seem beefy. One turns the not very attractive-looking
pages of the _English Mechanic_, 1893, casually, perhaps, at any rate in
no expectations of sensations—glaring at one, a sketch of such a
botanico-pathologic monstrosity as a musk melon with rows of bunions on
it (_English Mechanic_, Oct. 20, 1893). The reader is told, by Andrew
Barclay, F. R. A. S., Kilmarnock, Scotland, that this enormity is the
planet Jupiter, according to the speculum of his Gregorian telescope.
In the next issue of the _English Mechanic_, Capt. Noble, F. R. A. S.,
writes, gently enough, that, if he had such a telescope, he would
dispose of the optical parts for whatever they would bring, and would
make a chimney cowl of the tube.
_English Mechanic_, 1893-2-309—the planet Mars, by Andrew Barclay—a dark
sphere, surrounded by a thick ring of lighter material; attached to it,
another sphere, of half its diameter—a sketch as gross and repellent to
a conventionalist as the museum-freak, in whose body the head of his
dangling twin is embedded, its dwarfed body lopping out from his side.
There is a description by Mr. Barclay, according to whom the main body
is red, and the protuberance blue.
Capt. Noble—“Preposterous ... last straw that breaks the camel’s back!”
Mr. Barclay comes back with some new observations upon Jupiter’s lumps,
and then, in the rest of the volume is not heard from again. One reads
on, interested in quieter matters, and gradually forgets the
controversy—
_English Mechanic_, August 23, 1897:
A gallery of monstrosities: Andrew Barclay, signing himself “F. R. A.
S.,” exhibiting:
The planet Jupiter, six times encircled with lumps; afflicted Mars, with
his partly embedded twin reduced in size, but still a distress to all
properly trained observers; the planet Saturn, shaped like a mushroom
with a ring around it.
Capt. Noble—“Mr. Barclay is not a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical
Society, and, were the game worth the candle, might be restrained by
injunction from so describing himself!” And upon page 362, of this
volume of the _English Mechanic_, Capt. Noble calls the whole matter “a
pseudo F. R. A. S.’s crazy hallucinations.”
Lists of the Fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society, from June, 1875
to June, 1896:
“Barclay, Andrew, Kilmarnock, Scotland; elected Feb. 8, 1856.”
I can not find the list for 1897 in the libraries. List for 1898—Andrew
Barclay’s name omitted. Thou shalt not see lumps on Jupiter.
Every one of Barclay’s observations has something to support it. All
conventional representations of Jupiter show encirclements by strings of
rotundities that we are told are cloud-forms, but, in the _Jour. B. A.
A._, Dec. 1910, is published a paper by Dr. Downing, entitled “Is
Jupiter Humpy?” suggesting that various phenomena upon Jupiter agree
with the idea that there are protuberances upon the planet. A common
appearance, said to be an illusion, is Saturn as an oblong, if not
mushroom-shaped: see any good index for observations upon the
“square-shouldered aspect” of Saturn. In _L’Astronomie_, 1889-135, is a
sketch of Mars, according to Fontana, in the year 1636—a sphere enclosed
in a ring; in the center of the sphere a great protruding body, said, by
Fontana, to have looked like a vast, black cone.
But, whether this or that should amuse or enrage us, should be accepted
or rejected, is not to me the crux; but Andrew Barclay’s own opening
words are:
That, through a conventional telescope, conventional appearances are
seen, and that a telescope is tested by the conventionality of its
disclosures; but that there may be new optical principles, or
applications, that may be, to the eye and the present telescope, what
once the conventional telescope was to the eye—in times when scientists
refused to look at the preposterous, enraging, impossible moons of
Jupiter.
In the _English Mechanic_, 33-327, is a letter from the astronomer, A.
Stanley Williams. He had written previously upon double stars, their
colors and magnitudes. Another astronomer, Herbert Sadler, had pointed
out some errors. Mr. Williams acknowledges the errors, saying that some
were his own, and that some were from Smyth’s _Cycle of Celestial
Objects_. In the _English Mechanic_, 33-377, Sadler says that,
earnestly, he would advise Williams not to use the new edition of
Smyth’s _Cycle_, because, with the exception of vol. 40, _Memoirs of the
Royal Astronomical Society_, “a more disgracefully inaccurate” catalog
of double stars had never been published. “If,” says one astronomer to
the other astronomer, “you have a copy of this miserable production,
sell it for waste paper. It is crammed with the most stupid errors.”
A new character appears. He is George F. Chambers, F. R. A. S., author
of a long list of astronomical works, and a tract, entitled, _Where Are
You Going, Sunday_? He, too, is earnest. In this early correspondence,
nothing ulterior is apparent, and we suppose that it is in the cause of
Truth that he is so earnest. Says one astronomer that the other
astronomer is “evidently one of those self-sufficient young men, who are
nothing, if not abusive.” But can Mr. Sadler have so soon forgotten what
was done to him, on a former occasion, after he had slandered Admiral
Smyth? Chambers challenges Sadler to publish a list of, say fifty
“stupid errors” in the book. He quotes the opinion of the Astronomer
Royal: that the book was a work of “sterling merit.” “Airy vs. Sadler,”
he says: “which is it to be?”
We began not very promisingly. Few excitements seemed to lurk in such a
subject as double stars, their colors and magnitudes; but slander and
abuse are livelier, and now enters curiosity: we’d like to know what was
done to Herbert Sadler.
Late in the year 1876, Herbert Sadler was elected a Fellow of the Royal
Astronomical Society. In _Monthly Notices, R. A. S._, Jan., 1879,
appears his first paper that was read to the Society: _Notes on the late
Admiral Smyth’s Cycle of Celestial Objects, volume second, known as the
Bedford Catalogue_. With no especial vehemence, at least according to
our own standards of repression, Sadler expresses himself upon some
“extraordinary mistakes” in this work.
At the meeting of the Society, May 9, 1879, there was an attack upon
Sadler, and it was led by Chambers, or conducted by Chambers, who cried
out that Sadler had slandered a great astronomer, and demanded that
Sadler should resign. In the report of this meeting, published in the
_Observatory_, there is not a trace of anybody’s endeavors to find out
whether there were errors in this book or not: Chambers ignored
everything but his accusation of slander, and demanded again that Sadler
should resign. In _Monthly Notices_, 39-389, the Council of the Society
published regrets that it had permitted publication of Sadler’s paper,
“which was entirely unsupported by the citation of instances upon which
his judgment was founded.”
We find that it was Mr. Chambers who had revised and published the new
edition of Smyth’s _Cycle_.
In the _English Mechanic_, Chambers challenged Sadler to publish, say,
fifty “stupid errors.” See page 451, vol. 33, _English Mechanic_—Sadler
lists just fifty “stupid errors.” He says that he could have listed, not
50, but 250, not trivial, but of the “grossest kind.” He says that in
one set of 167 observations, 117 were wrong.
The _English Mechanic_ drops out of this comedy with the obvious title,
but developments go on. Evidently withdrawing its “regrets,” the Council
permitted publication of a criticism of Chambers’ edition of Smyth’s
_Cycle_, in _Monthly Notices_, 40-497, and the language in this
criticism, by S. W. Burnham, was no less interpretable as slanderous
than was Sadler’s: that Smyth’s data were “either roughly approximate or
grossly incorrect, and so constantly recurring that it was impossible to
explain that they were ordinary errors of observation.” Burnham lists 30
pages of errors.
Following is a paper by E. B. Knobel, who published 17 pages of
instances in which, in his opinion, Mr. Burnham had been too severe.
Knowing of no objection by Burnham to this reduction, we have left 13
pages of errors in one standard astronomical work, which may fairly be
considered as representative of astronomical work in general, inasmuch
as it was, in the opinion of the Astronomer Royal, a book of “sterling
merit.”
I think that now we have accomplished something. After this we should
all get along more familiarly and agreeably together. Thirteen pages of
errors in one standard astronomical work are reassuring; there is a
likeable fallibility here that should make for better relations. If the
astronomers were what they think they are, we might as well make squeaks
of disapproval against Alpine summits. As to astronomers who calculate
positions of planets—of whom he was one—Newcomb, in _Reminiscences of an
Astronomer_, says—“The men who have done it are therefore, in intellect,
the select few of the human race—an aristocracy above all others in the
scale of being.” We could never get along comfortably with such awful
selectness as that. We are grateful to Mr. Sadler, in the cause of more
comfortable relations.