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after Swift had been heard from.
    Perched upon two delusions, Prof. Chase crowed his false raptures. The unknown bodies, whether they ever had been in the orbit of his calculations or not, were never seen again.
    So it is our expression that hosts of astronomers calculate, and calculation-mad, calculate and calculate and calculate, and that, when one of them does point within 600,000,000 miles (by conventional measurements) of something that is found, he is the Leverrier of the textbooks; that the others are the Prof. Chases not of the textbooks.
    As to most of us, the symbols of the infinitesimal calculus humble independent thinking into the conviction that used to be enforced by drops of blood from a statue. In the farrago and conflicts of daily lives, it is relief to feel such a rapport with finality, in a religious sense, or in a mathematical sense. So then, if the seeming of exactness in Astronomy be either infamously, or carelessly and laughingly, brought about by the connivances of which Swift and Watson were accused, and if the prestige of Astronomy be founded upon nothing but huge capital letters and exclamation points, or upon the disproportionality of balancing one Leverrier against hundreds of Chases, it may not be better that we should know this, if then to those of us who, in the religious sense, have nothing to depend upon, comes deprivation of even this last, lingering seeming of foundation, or seeming existence of exactness and realness, somewhere—
    Except—that, if there be nearby lands in the sky and beings from foreign worlds that visit this earth, that is a great subject, and the trash that is clogging an epoch must be cleared away.
    We have had a little sermon upon the insecurity of human triumphs, and, having brought it to a climax, now seems to be the time to stop; but there is still an involved “triumph” and I’d not like to have inefficiency, as well as probably everything else, charged against us—
    The Discovery of Uranus.
    We mention this stimulus to the textbook writers’ ecstasies, because out of phenomena of the planet Uranus, the “Neptune-triumph” developed. For Richard Proctor’s reasons for arguing that this discovery was not accidental, see Old and New Astronomy, p. 646. Philosophical Transactions, 71-492—a paper by Herschel—“An account of a comet discovered on March 13, 1781.” A year went by, and not an astronomer in the world knew a new planet when he saw one: then Lexeil did find out that the supposed comet was a planet.
    Statues from which used to drip the life-blood of a parasitic cult—
    Structures of parabolas from which bleed equations—
    As we go along we shall develop the acceptance that astronomers might as well try to squeeze blood from images as to try to seduce symbols into conclusions, because applicable mathematics has no more to do with planetary interactions than have statues of saints. If this denial that the calculi have place in gravitational astronomy be accepted, the astronomers lose their supposed god; they become an unfocused priesthood; the stamina of their arrogance wilts. We begin with the next to the simplest problem in celestial mechanics: that is, the formulation of the inter-actions of the sun and the moon and this earth. In the highest of mathematics, final, sacred mathematics, can this next to the simplest problem in so-called mathematical astronomy be solved?
    It cannot be solved.
    Every now and then, somebody announces that he has solved the Problem of the Three Bodies, but it is always an incomplete, or impressionistic, demonstration, compounded of abstractions, and ignoring the conditions of bodies in space. Over and over we shall find vacancy under supposed achievements; elaborate structures that are pretensions without foundation. Here we learn that astronomers cannot formulate the interactions of three bodies in space, but calculate anyway, and publish what they call the formula of a planet that is interacting with a thousand