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of when he says : ' ' Not only must the astronomer be the 

 wisest and intellectually the most penetrating of men, but 

 in order to be a discoverer of the first order, he must be 

 just in his habits of mind and wholly devoted to truth. " 



Proceeding along paths of the same order of " pene- 

 trative " reasoning, Doctor See " solves " nearly every 

 imaginable enigma that has baffled astronomers in the 

 past ; but I shall not pursue the ungrateful task of criticis- 

 ing his weird speculations further than to cite a single 

 sample of his art of deductive reasoning from his chosen 

 premises : 



The extreme roundness of the orbit of Neptune is a clear 

 indication that this planet moved for a long time against a vast 

 amount of nebulous resistance. Therefore, it is very improbable 

 that our planetary system terminates with Neptune. In all prob- 

 ability there are several more planets beyond the present boundary 

 of the system, some of which may yet be discovered. 



It so happens that Mercury, the innermost planet, 

 which ostensibly has had many thousands of times more 

 schooling at the hands of this alleged resisting medium 

 than did Neptune, is by far the most eccentric of any, 

 whereas, next to Venus, Neptune's orbit is the most 

 rounded. In fact, there is no element of our planetary 

 orbits more irreducible to a regular rule than just this 

 one of ellipticity, as you may see from a list of the planets 

 arranged in the order of this peculiarity: Mercury, 

 Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Earth, Neptune, Venus. 

 Furthermore, we cannot decently concede that it is in any 

 sense consistent with See's general hypothesis that Nep- 

 tune, in particular, could ever have enjoyed the benefit of 

 the resistance of any matter now incorporated in the sun 

 and interior planets, for all of that matter must inevi- 

 tably have preceded and beaten him in the race of cen- 

 tralization. Making allowance for this factor, it can 

 easily be figured that the nebular density of the zone ac- 

 tually traversed by Neptune was a billion times less than 

 the vacuousness already computed, yielding a result 

 comparable to that of a single cubic foot of atmospheric 

 air to the volume of our earth ! And it is from this noth- 

 ingness revolving, mirabile dictu, in the same direction, 



