pulse while observing, he attained the requisite accuracy. It is the mark of genius to obtain valuable results by imperfect instruments. We know what good service has been rendered to chemical science by blacking pots in the hands of a Priestly.
The next point was the telescope. Was it good enough to see the small black point? Here Lescarbault spoke with more confidence. He had, after great privation and suffering, saved enough to buy a lens. The optician, seeing his enthusiasm and poverty, gave it cheap. He made the tube himself, and all the fittings necessary to mount it properly. He, then, went into some technical details, to explain how, by means of threads stretched across the focus of the telescope, he was able to measure distances on the sun's disc.
Leverrier being thoroughly satisfied as to the means of making the observation, next turned to the observation itself. It might be, after all, a fabrication, such things being known in the history of astronomy. He, therefore, demanded the original jotting of the observation, to see if it tallied with the deduced statement. Lescarbault now got somewhat alarmed, as he was in the habit of burning the scraps of paper on which he had jotted down his observations, after he had fairly entered them. He, however, rummaged every corner, and at last found the scrap in his nautical almanac, serving as a book-mark. Leverrier seized it eagerly. It was a square powder-paper,
