"... You ought, when you came to put me in the 'Budget,' to have been aware of the Report of the Council of the Royal Astronomical Society, where it appears that Professor Airy,[654] with a better 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.