WHAT WERE THEY ? 699- 



ASTRONOMY. 



WHAT WERE THEY ? 



LOUIS WATSON, M. D. 



On the morning of January 20, 1865, the Second Division of the 14th Army 

 Corps, under the command of General Jas. D. Morgan, left Savannah on the 

 march toward Richmond. About 8:00 o'clock on that morning when in the act 

 of mounting my horse to accompany the General, as usual upon a movement as 

 one of his staff ofificers, I observed upon the Sun, at that time through an elevated 

 fog appearing as a deep red disk, two round black spots. They were near to- 

 gether, one much larger than the other, the lesser one as large as Venus appeared 

 to my naked eye in its last transit, the larger one of triple or quadruple diameter. 

 I lingered two or three minutes to observe them, then moved on with the Sun 

 behind me. That day and the three following days proved cloudy and more or 

 less rainy, the Sun not again becoming visible until a clear day on the 24th. 

 No smoked glass, nor a substitute for one being convenient, I made no further 

 observation. If these objects were "sun-spots" — at the time I imagined them 

 to be nothing else — I very well knew that they were remarkably large ones, and 

 from the duration of their presence as "sun-spots" that they could not escape 

 the observation of astronomers and I confidently expected that after leaving 

 the service I should meet with some account of them. In this anticipation I 

 have been disappointed. In 1879 at a neighbor's house I picked up Tice's 

 almanac for that year and among other matter I read what he had to say about 

 " Vulcan " and its satellite. This article recalled my observation at Savannah 

 and I wrote to Mr. Tice giving him an account of it and inquired if what 

 I had seen could possibly be a transit of his "Vulcan." The following in his 

 reply verbatim et literatim, but the words within brackets correcting an obvious 

 error, are mine : 



St. Louis, Mo., October 4, 1879. 

 Dr. Louis Watson, Ellis, Kansas. 



Dear Sir: — " Yours of ist inst. received. It would puzzle me to account 

 ' for the black round spots observed by you in Jan'y, 1865, if I had not arrived 

 ' at the conclusion and published it long ago that there were two principal inter- 

 ' mercurial planets attended with satellites, that they were one-half of a revolu- 

 * tion apart.and revolved in the same period, 23,026 days. One's orbit seems to 

 ' make about 14° with the Ecliptic (which is the one I saw) and the other about 

 ' 76° (which you saw). If you saw it on the 20th of January then it intersected 

 '[the plane of] the earth's orbit in 120° heliocentric longitude where the earth 



