The discovery of the planet Neptune by Dr. Galle on the twenty-third of September, 1846, was one of the most important events in the intellectual history of this century.  Certainly it was no small thing to find a new world.  Discoverers on the surface of our globe are immortalized by finding new lands in unknown regions.  What, therefore, should be the fame of him who finds a new world in the depths of space?  Perhaps the discoverer of an asteroid or planetary moon may not claim, in the present advanced stage of human knowledge, to rank among the flying evangels of history; but he who found the great planet third in rank among the worlds of the solar system, a world having a mass nearly seventeen times as great as that of our own, may well be regarded as one of the immortals.

We have referred the discovery of Neptune to Dr. Johann Gottfried Galle, the German astronomer and Professor of Natural Sciences at Berlin.  But this Dr. Galle was only the eye with which the discovery was made.  He was a good eye; but the eye, however clear, is only an organ of something greater than the eye, and that something in this case consisted of two parts.  The first part was Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier, the French astronomer, of the Paris Observatory.  The other part was Professor John Couch Adams, the astronomer of the University at Cambridge, England.  These two were the thinkers; that is, they were, as it were, jointly the great mind of the age, of which Galle was the eye.

In getting a clear notion of the discovery of Neptune, several other personages are to be considered.  One of these is the astronomer Alexis Bouvart, of France, who was born in Haute Savoie, in 1767, and died in June of 1843, three years before Neptune was found.  Another personage was his nephew, the astronomer E. Bouvart, and a third was the noted Prussian, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, Director of the Observatory at Koenigsberg, who was born in 1784, and died on the seventeenth of March, 1846, only six months before the discovery of our outer planet.

Still another character to be commemorated is the English astronomer Professor James Challis, Plumian Professor and Director of the Observatory at Cambridge, England.  This contributor to the great event was born in 1803, and died at Cambridge on the third of December, 1882.  Still another, not to be disregarded, is Dr. T.J.  Hussey, of Hayes, England, whose mind seems to have been one of the first to anticipate the existence of an ultra-Uranian planet.  And still again, the English astronomer royal, Sir G.B.  Airy must be mentioned as a contributor to the final result; but he is to be regarded rather as a contributor by negation.  The great actors in the thing done were Leverrier, Adams and Galle.  English authors contend strongly for placing the names in this order:  Adams, Leverrier and Galle.