appreciation
of my demonstrations, had admitted--'strange,' say the Council, 'as it
may appear,'--that 'the whole question of solar motion in space [and
here Mr. Reddie omits some words] is now in _doubt and abeyance_.' You
were culpable as a public teacher of no little pretensions, if you were
'unaware' of this. If aware of it, you ought not to have suppressed
such an important testimony to my really having been 'very successful'
in drawing the teeth of the pegtops, though you thought them so firmly
fixed. And if you still suppress {348} it, in your Appendix, or when
you reprint your 'Budget,' you will then be guilty of a _suppressio
veri_, also of further injury to me, who have never injured you...."

Mr. Reddie must have been very well satisfied in his own mind before he
ventured such a challenge, with an answer from me looming in the distance.
The following is the passage of the Report of the Council, etc., from which
he quotes:

"And yet, strange to say, notwithstanding the near coincidence of all
the results of the before-mentioned independent methods of
investigation, the inevitable logical inference deduced by Mr. Airy is,
that the whole question of solar motion in space, _so far at least as
accounting for the proper motion of the stars is concerned_, [I have
put in italics the words omitted by Mr. Reddie] appears to remain at
this moment in doubt and abeyance."

Mr. Reddie has forked me, as he thinks, on a dilemma: if unaware, culpable
ignorance; if aware, suppressive intention. But the thing is a _trilemma_,
and the third horn, on which I elect to be placed, is surmounted by a
doubly-stuffed seat. First, Mr. Airy has not changed his opinion about the
_fact_ of solar motion in space, but only suspends it as to the sufficiency
of present means to give the amount and direction of the motion. Secondly,
all that is alluded to in the Astronomical Report was said and printed
before the Victoria proclamation appeared. So that the author, instead of
drawing the tooth of the Astronomer Royal's pegtop, has burnt his own
doll's nose.

William Herschel,[655] and after him about six other astronomers, had aimed
at determining, by the proper motions of the stars, the point of the
heavens towards which the solar system is moving: their results were
tolerably accordant. Mr. Airy, in 1859, proposed an improved method, and,
applying it to stars of large prope