The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-03-31

through its discovery by Sir William Herchel in 1783. He saw among the smaller stars of the Genninf group one that seemed to have a little disk shape instead of the irregular shape of. the stars He suspected that it was a comet, but, a mathematician. Lexe1I by name, worked out the new body's orbit and found that it could not be, one, but was a new planet.
 The name first given to this planet was .Georgium Sidus, the throne of King George, but for obvious reasons this name did not become permanent, and Uranus was soon commonly adopted. Immediately very careful studies of the motions of this new child of the sun were made, but these did not all seem to fit into any parti- cular orbit which could be worked out for it. That it was a planet there was no doubt but why then did it not seem to act as it should, in conformity withNtbe laws of gravitation? The an- swer which was considered as prob ably the true solution of this riddle was that still another planet exterior to this. one was disturbing it's motions by it's attraction. From a careful study of these disturbances in the mo- tions of Uranus a young Englishman named Adams succeeded in working out the probab1ei position and orbit of this supposed planet and requested the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich to search for it. The latter neglected to do so and in the meantime Lever rier the F'renchman had worked out the problem in a similar way and re- quested Gallo at Berlin to make the search The latter did so and in a very short time found the body Ee-. verrier wrote him of within one de- gree of the predicted location. The ca1cu1at5ons of Adams. as seen after wards, were almost as correct and certainly had the priority Both de- ian laws Of gravitational attraction were fully Confirmed.
 OTHER PLANETS
 Some astronomers have not been satisfied to regard Neptune as the out ermost planet but have for various reasons suspected the existence of an other planet still farther out, but the most painstaking research has failed to find suchNa body. But other plan tune and Uranus Tn fact some hun dreds of them have already been dis covered, and new ones are often add ed to the list But, of course, we do not mean to. imply that these are large bodies like the we11-known members of the suns family, yet they are large enough so that the sunlight
 
 gister on a photographic plate of pro- per exposure, and many of them have even been discovered by eye observe tions with telescopes. We refer to the so-caIIed p1anetoids which exist in great number between the orbits of Mars and Earth and each of which rotates about the sun in an orbit of it's own just like one of it's greater brother planets. What is the exp1an- ation of the small planets? We can base this on the nebular hypothesis; as the ss4n shrunk it cast off success sive rings which in consolidation be- came the planets as we know them to- day. The outernlost planets were of course thrown off first The next ring after the one that became Jupiter was prevented, perhaps by the perturba- tionss Of big Jupiter himself from con so1fdating and so. instead of merging into one large body. became great number of small bodies whose orbits lie about where another planet should be The next ring became Mars.