Nevertheless we seem to have a feeling that with the System against us we have a kind of resistance here. We'd have felt so formerly, at any rate: I think the Dr. Grays and Prof. Hitchcocks have modified our trustfulness toward indistinguishability. As to the perfection of this System that quasi-opposes us and the infallibility of its mathematics—as if there could be real mathematics in a mode of seeming where twice two are not four—we've been told over and over of their vindication in the discovery of Neptune.
I'm afraid that the course we're taking will turn out like every other development. We began humbly, admitting that we're of the damned—
But our eyebrows—
Just a faint flicker in them, or in one of them, every time we hear of the "triumphal discovery of Neptune"—this "monumental achievement of theoretical astronomy," as the text-books call it.
The whole trouble is that we've looked it up.
The text-books omit this:
That, instead of the orbit of Neptune agreeing with the calculations of Adams and Leverrier, it was so different—that Leverrier said that it was not the planet of his calculations.
Later it was thought best to say no more upon that subject.
The text-books omit this:
That, in 1846, everyone who knew a sine from a cosine was out sining and cosining for a planet beyond Uranus.