Astronomer Royal to abandon the fact of motion of the solar system by the February following. Had Mr. Reddie, when he saw that the Council were avowedly describing a memoir presented some time before, taken the precaution to find out when that memoir was presented, he would perhaps have seen that doubts of the results obtained, expressed by one astronomer in March, 1863, and by another in 1859, could not have been due to his publication of September, 1863. And any one else would have learnt that neither astronomer doubts the solar motion, though both doubt the sufficiency of present means to determine its amount and direction. This is implied in the omitted words, which Mr. Reddie—whose omission would have been dishonest if he had seen their meaning—no doubt took for pleonasm, superfluity, overmuchness. The rashness which pushed him headlong into the quillet that his thunderbolt had stopped the chariot of the Sun and knocked the Greenwich Phaethon off the box, is the same which betrayed him into yet grander error—which deserves the full word, quidlibet—about the Principia of Newton. There has been no change of opinion at all. When a person undertakes a long investigation, his opinion is that, at a certain date, there is primâ facie ground for thinking a sound result may be obtained. Should it happen that the investigation ends in doubt upon the sufficiency of the grounds, the investigator is not put in the wrong. He knew beforehand that there was an alternative and he takes the horn of the alternative indicated by his calculations.
The two sides of this case present an instructive contrast. Eight astronomers produce nearly the same result, and yet the last two doubt the sufficiency of their means: compare them with the what's-his-name who rushes in where thing-em-bobs fear to tread.
I was not aware, until what I had written what precedes, that Mr. Airy had given a sufficient answer on the point. Mr. Reddie says (Correspondent, Jan. 20, 1866):
'I claim to have forced Professor Airy to give up the notion of "solar motion in space" altogether, for he admits it to be "at present in doubt and abeyance." I first made that claim in a letter addressed to the Astronomer Royal himself in June, 1864, and in replying, very courteously, to other portions of my letter, he did not gainsay that part of it.'
Mr. Reddie is not ready at reading satire, or he never would have so missed the meaning of the courteous reply on one point, and the total silence upon another. Mr. Airy must be one of
