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It was on the first day of the New Year that the announcement
was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the
motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets
that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had
already called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity
in December. Such a piece of news was scarcely calculated to
interest a world the greater portion of whose inhabitants were
unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, nor outside the
astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of a faint
remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause
any very great excitement. Scientific people, however, found the
intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that
the new body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its
motion was quite different from the orderly progress of the
planets, and that the deflection of Neptune and its satellite was
becoming now of an unprecedented kind.
Few people without a training in science can realise the huge
isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets,
its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a
vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the
orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation
has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness,
for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest
estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of
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