It was the time when Adams
and Leverrier were contending to which of them belonged the honor of the
discovery of the planet Neptune, and each side had its strong partisans.
Among Miss Mitchell's papers we find the following with reference to
this subject:
"... Adams, a graduate of Cambridge, made the calculations which showed
how an unseen body must exist whose influences were felt by Uranus. It
was a problem of great difficulty, for he had some half-dozen quantities
touching Uranus which were not accurately known, and as many wholly
unknown concerning the unseen planet. We think it a difficult question
which involves three or four unknown quantities with too few
circumstances, but this problem involved twelve or thirteen, so that x,
y, z reached pretty high up into the alphabet. But Adams, having worked
the problem, carried his work to Airy, the Astronomer Royal of England,
and awaited his comments. A little later Leverrier, the French
astronomer, completed the same problem, and waiting for no authority
beyond his own, flung his discovery out to the world with the
self-confidence of a Frenchman....
"... When the news of the discovery of Neptune reached this country, I
happened to be visiting at the observatory in Cambridge, Mass. Professor
Bond (the elder) had looked for the planet the night before I arrived at
his house, and he looked again the evening that I came.
"His observatory was then a small, round building, and in it was a small
telescope; he had drawn a map of a group of stars, one of which he
supposed was not a star, but the planet.
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