The Debatable Land Between This World and the Next - With Illustrative Narrations #272495

"In Scripture we are perpetually reminded that the law of the spiritual world are in the highest sense laws of Nature, whose obligation, operation, and effect are all in the constitution and course of things." - Argyll<br><br>One of the best known and most brilliant among the triumphs of astronomical science was the prediction, in advance of actual discovery, of the existence and, approximately, of the place in the heavens, of a planet belonging to our solar system and revolving outside of Uranus.<br><br>Certain data had long been known to astronomers: as that planets, if subject to the sun's attraction only, would revolve in ellipses; but that, being subject also, in a feeble but appreciable degree, to the attraction of each other, this minor influence causes them to deviate from their true elliptic paths; and that these perturbations, as they are called, are calculable, so that each planet's exact place on any given day, past or future, can be ascertained.<br><br>Again, though Uranus was discovered as late as 1781, this planet had been seen, mistaken for a fixed star which afterward disappeared, and its place registered as such, as early as 1690; and it had been so noted, at intervals, by several observers throughout the eighteenth century.