But Adams, having worked the problem, carried his work to Airy, the Astronomer Royal of England, and awaited his comments.

A little later Leverrier, the French astronomer, completed the same problem, and waiting for no authority beyond his own, flung his discovery out to the world with the self-confidence of a Frenchman....
"...

When the news of the discovery of Neptune reached this country, I happened to be visiting at the observatory in Cambridge, Mass.

Professor Bond (the elder) had looked for the planet the night before I arrived at his house, and he looked again the evening that I came.
"His observatory was then a small, round building, and in it was a small telescope; he had drawn a map of a group of stars, one of which he supposed was not a star, but the planet.

He set the telescope to this group, and asking his son to count the seconds, he allowed the stars to pass by the motion of the earth across the field.