Such a conspiracy of proof was not to be resisted, and at the anniversary meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in February, 1864, the correction of the solar distance took the foremost place in the annals of the year. Lest, however, a sudden bound of four million miles nearer to the centre of our system should shake public faith in astronomical accuracy, it was explained that the change in the solar parallax corresponding to that huge leap, amounted to no more than the breadth of a human hair 125 feet from the eye![763] The Nautical Almanac gave from 1870 the altered value of 8.95", for which Newcomb's result of 8.85", adopted in 1869 in the Berlin Ephemeris, was substituted some ten years later. In astronomical literature the change was initiated by Sir Edmund Beckett in the first edition (1865) of his _Astronomy without Mathematics_. If any doubt remained as to the misleading character of Encke's deduction, so long implicitly trusted in, it was removed by Powalky's and Stone's rediscussions, in 1864 and 1868 respectively, of the transit observations of 1769. Using improved determinations of the longitude of the various stations, and a selective judgment in dealing with their materials, which, however indispensable, did not escape adverse criticism, they brought out results confirmatory of the no longer disputed necessity for largely increasing the solar parallax, and proportionately diminishing the solar distance. Once more in 1890, and this time with better success, the eighteenth-century transits were investigated by Professor Newcomb.[764] Turning to account the experience gained in the interim regarding the optical phenomena accompanying such events, he elicited from the mass of somewhat discordant observations at his command, a parallax (8·79") in close agreement with the value given by sundry modes of recent research. Conclusions on the subject, however, were still regarded as purely provisional. A transit of Venus was fast approaching, and to its arbitrament, as to that of a court of final appeal, the pending question was to be referred. It is true that the verdict in the same case by the same tribunal a century earlier had proved of so indecisive a character as to form only a starting-point for fresh litigation; but that century had not passed in vain, and it was confidently anticipated that observational difficulties, then equally unexpected and insuperable, would yield to the elaborate care and skill of forewarned modern preparation.