with another telescope which he tried. But several of his
friends saw it with the long telescope. Amongst others, Horrebow,
Professor of Astronomy, saw the satellite on March 10 and 11, after
taking several precautions to prevent optical illusion. A few days later
Montbaron, at Auxerre, who had heard nothing of these observations, saw
a satellite, and again on March 28 and 29 it appeared, always in a
different position.

It should be added that Scheuten asserted that during the transit of
1761 Venus was accompanied by a small satellite in her motion across the
sun's face.

So confidently did many believe in this satellite of Venus that
Frederick the Great, who for some reason imagined that he was entitled
to dispose as he pleased of the newly discovered body, proposed to
assign it away to the mathematician D'Alembert, who excused himself from
accepting the questionable honour in the following terms:--

'Your Majesty does me too much honour in wishing to baptize this new
planet with my name. I am neither great enough to become the satellite
of Venus in the heavens, nor well enough (_assez bien portant_) to be so
on the earth, and I am too well content with the small place I occupy in
this lower world to be ambitious of a place in the firmament.'

It is not at all easy to explain how this phantom satellite came to be
seen. Father Hell, of Vienna--the same astronomer whom Sir G. Airy
suspects of falling asleep during the progress of the transit of Venus
in 1769--made some experiments showing how a false image of the planet
might be seen beside the true one, the false image being smaller and
fainter, like the moons seen by Schort (as Hell called Short), Cassini,
and the rest. And more recently Sir David Brewster stated that Wargentin
'had in his possession a good achromatic telescope, which always showed
Venus with such a satellite.' But Hell admitted that the falsehood of
the unreal Venus was easily detected, and Brewster adds to his account
of Wargentin's phantom moon, that 'the deception was discovered by
turning the telescope about its axis.' As Admiral Smyth well remarks, to
endeavour to explain away in this manner the observations made by
Cassini and Short 'must be a mere pleasantry, for it is impossible such
accurate observers could have been deceived by so gross a neglect.'
Smyth, by the way, was a believer in the moon of Venus. 'The contested
satellite is perhaps extremely minute,' he says, 'while some parts of