He set the telescope to this
group, and asking his son to count the seconds, he allowed the stars to
pass by the motion of the earth across the field. If they kept the
relative distance of the night before, they were all stars; if any one
had approached or receded from the others, it was a planet; and when the
father looked at his son's record he said, 'One of those has moved, and
it is the one which I thought last night was the planet.' He looked
again at the group, and the son said, 'Father, do give me a look at the
new planet--you are the only man in America that can do it!' And then we
both looked; it looked precisely like a small star, and George and I
both asked, 'What made you think last night that it was the new planet?'
Mr. Bond could only say, 'I don't know, it looked different from the
others.'
"It is always so--you cannot get a man of genius to explain steps, he
leaps.
"After the discovery of this planet, Professor Peirce, in our own
country, declared that it was not the planet of the theory, and
therefore its discovery was a happy accident. But it seemed to me that
it was the planet of the theory, just as much if it varied a good deal
from its prescribed place as if it varied a little. So you might have
said that Uranus was not the Uranus of the theory.
"Sir John Herschel said, 'Its movements have been felt trembling along
the far-reaching line of our analysis, with a certainty hardly inferior
to ocular demonstration.
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