The planet Jupiter, six times encircled with lumps; afflicted Mars, with his partly embedded twin reduced in size, but still a distress to all properly trained observers; the planet Saturn, shaped like a mushroom with a ring around it.
Capt. Noble—“Mr. Barclay is not a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and, were the game worth the candle, might be restrained by injunction from so describing himself!” And upon page 362, of this volume of the English Mechanic, Capt Noble calls the whole matter “a pseudo F. R. A. S.’s crazy hallucinations.”
Lists of the Fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society, from June, 1875 to June, 1896:
“Barclay, Andrew, Kilmarnock, Scotland; elected Feb. 8, 1856.”
I can not find the list for 1897 in the libraries. List for 1898— Andrew Barclay’s name omitted. Thou shalt not see lumps on Jupiter.
Every one of Barclay’s observations has something to support it. All conventional representations of Jupiter show encirclements by strings of rotundities that we are told are cloud-forms, but, in the Jour. B. A. A., Dec. 1910, is published a paper by Dr. Downing, entitled “Is Jupiter Humpy?” suggesting that various phenomena upon Jupiter agree with the idea that there are protuberances upon the planet. A common appearance, said to be an illusion, is Saturn as an oblong, if not mushroom-shaped: see any good index for observations upon the “square-shouldered aspect” of Saturn. In L'Astronomie, 1889-135, is a sketch of Mars, according to Fontana, in the year 1636—a sphere enclosed in a ring; in the center of the sphere a great protruding body, said, by Fontana, to have looked like a vast, black cone.
But, whether this or that should amuse or enrage us, should be accepted or rejected, is not to me the crux; but Andrew Barclay’s own opening words are:
That, through a conventional telescope, conventional appearances are seen, and that a telescope is tested by the conventionality of its disclosures; but that there may be new optical principles, or applications, that may be, to the eye and the present telescope, what once the conventional telescope was to the eye—in times
