That was before excommunication was pronounced.
He says:
"If it will fit one of Leverrier's orbits"—
It didn't fit.
In Nature, 21-301, Prof. Swift says:
"I have never made a more valid observation, nor one more free from doubt."
He's damned anyway.
We shall have some data that will not live up to most rigorous requirements, but, if anyone would like to read how carefully and minutely these two sets of observations were made, see Prof. Swift's detailed description in the Am. Jour. Sci., 116-313; and the technicalities of Prof. Watson's observations in Monthly Notices, 38-525.
Our own acceptance upon dirigible worlds, which is assuredly enough, more nearly real than attempted concepts of large planets relatively near this earth, moving in orbits, but visible only occasionally; which more nearly approximates to reasonableness than does wholesale slaughter of Swift and Watson and Fritsche and Stark and De Cuppis—but our own acceptance is so painful to so many minds that, in another of the charitable moments that we have now and then for the sake of contrast, we offer relief:
The things seen high in the sky by Swift and Watson—