71 
ridiculous to take the trouble to discover new planets ! But 
surely this is proving or assuming too much; and certainly, if 
we may reason thus, the discovery of Neptune was superero- 
gatory ! Apparently, Mr. Warington is not aware that there 
have been other hitches about gravitation; and that M. Le 
Verrier some time ago, in order to keep the solar system in 
(rear upon the Newtonian hypothesis, was obliged to have re- 
course to this same mode of proof, and to invent an invisible 
“ ring of asteroids between the sun and Mercury, the aggre- 
gate mass of which was comparable to that of Mercury ; and 
another ring of asteroids near the earth equal to a tenth of the 
earth's mass," &c. I quote this from Mr. Hind's letter to The 
Times of 17th September, 1863. And I must further remind 
Mr Warington of another discovery, made by our own astro- 
nomer, Mr. Adams, namely, that his predecessors had all 
omitted, in computing “ the acceleration of the moon's mean 
motion," to allow for the effect of the sun's disturbing force 
when acting in the direction of a tangent to the moon s orbit. 
An account of this is given in Lord Wrottesley's address, as 
President of the British Association at Oxford, in June, 1860. 
On this point there were three great mathematicians, Adams, 
Airy, and the late Sir John Lubbock, on one side, with three 
equally distinguished names, MM. Plana, Pontecoulant, and 
Hansen, on the other; and strangely enough it is ad- 
mitted by the English mathematicians, and by Lord Wrottes- 
ley, while they declare Mr. Adams to be right, that all the 
calculations come out more accurately when the sun's influence 
upon the moon is omitted, which it certainly ought not to have 
been, if the moon is subject to the sun's attraction ! * 
It is, however, notwithstanding such facts as these, that 
Mr. Warington makes his appeal to universal gravitation ; and 
that Mr. Darwin says, “ there is grandeur in this view of life 
with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the 
Creator into a few forms or into one ; and that, whilst this 
planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gra- 
vity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beauti- 
ful and most wonderful, have been, and are being evolved." t 
And so, Professor Huxley, in Man’s Place in Nature, is “ fully 
convinced that, if not precisely true, Mr. Darwin's hypothesis 
is as near an approximation to the truth, as, for instance, the 
Copernican hypothesis was to the true theory of the planetary 
motions." Lastly, Dr. Biichner, as a frankly avowed atheist, 
gives us this extraordinary opening to his chapter on Primeval 
Generation There was a time when the earth— a fiery globe 
* Vide Current Phys. Astr ., in loc. (Hardwicke.) f Orig. of Species, p. 525. 
