NEPTUNE.
And now we come to the “last but not least,” by any means, of our planets—a planet, however, that interests us but very little, as we can only see it through a quite powerful telescope, and then only as a small, pale disk. Yet its movements are ascertained and recorded just as those are of other planets, and so far as we know them, we are just as confident of the obtained results. As much so as we are of the some two hundred and twenty small bodies that are so much nearer to us, whose orbits lie between that of Mars and that of Jupiter; more confident than we are of the orbits of those erratic bodies we call comets, which seem to come and go at pleasure, and were formerly the terror of all who beheld them; and of those other bodies known as meteors, meteorites, or aerolites, which not only terrify those who behold them, but frequently injure and destroy the beings with which they come in contact. In fact, we know that Neptune, although apparently so small, is a globe 34,500 miles in diameter, and so far away as to do us no harm, while there may be thousands of little invisible globes flying around our earth waiting for some favorable opportunity to break away from their restraints and hurl themselves, as those did at Stannern in 1812, or at Orgueil, in France, in 1864, upon our devoted heads or our cherished treasures. Let us, then, respect our obscure and distant friend, with whom we are definitely acquainted, and record his acts as follows: For the first part of the month he will be an evening star; from the 13th, on which date he will be in conjunction with the sun, he will be a morning star; and on the 14th, at 7:47 a. m., will be 2° 15′ north of the moon. His motion will be direct, and amount to 1° 10′; his diameter 2.5″. On the 11th, at 6:00 p. m., he will be 1° 15′ south of Venus. On the 1st he will rise at 5:44 a. m. and set at 7:42 p. m.; on the 16th, rise at 4:48 a. m., set at 6:48 p. m.; on the 30th, rise at 3:54 a. m., set at 5:34 p. m.