The discovery of the asteroids, or in Prof. Chases's not very careful language, the discovery of the "asteroidal belt as deduced from Bode's Law":
We learn that Baron Von Zach had formed a society of twenty-four astronomers to search, in accordance with Bode's Law, for "a planet" — and not "a group," not "an asteroidal belt"—between Jupiter and Mars. The astronomers had organized, dividing the zodiac into twenty-four zones, assigning each zone to an astronomer. They searched. They found not one asteroid. Seven or eight hundred are now known.
Philosophical Magazine, 12-62:
That Piazzi, the discoverer of the first asteroid, had not been searching for a hypothetic body, as deduced from Bode's Law, but, upon an investigation of his own, had been charting stars in the constellation Taurus, night of Jan. 1, 1801. He noticed a light that he thought had moved, and, with his mind a blank, so far as asteroids and brilliant deductions were concerned, announced that he had discovered a comet.
As an instance of the crafty way in which some astronomers now tell the story, see Sir Robert Ball's The Story of the Heavens, p. 230:
The organization of astronomers of Lilienthal, but never a hint that Piazzi was not one of them—"the search for a small planet was soon rewarded by a success that has rendered the evening of the first day of the nineteenth century memorable in astronomy." Ball tells of Piazzi's charting of the stars, and makes it appear that Piazzi had charted stars as a means of finding asteroids deductively, rewarded soon by success, whereas Piazzi had never heard of such a search, and did not know an asteroid when he saw one. "This laborious and accomplished astronomer had organized an ingenious system of exploring the heavens, which was eminently calculated to discriminate a planet among the starry host...at length he was rewarded by a success which amply compensated him for all his toil."
Prof. Chase—these two great instances not of mere discovery, but of discovery by means of calculation according to him—now the subject of his supposition that he, too, could calculate triumphantly—the verification depended upon the accuracy of
