Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that the Berlin astronomer had two circumstances in his favour apart from which his swift success could hardly have been achieved. The first was the possession of a good star-map; the second was the clear and confident nature of Leverrier's instructions. "Look where I tell you," he seemed authoritatively to say, "and you will see an object such as I describe."[221] And in fact, not only Galle on the 23rd of September, but also Challis on the 29th, immediately after reading the French geometer's lucid and impressive treatise, picked out from among the stellar points strewing the zodiac, a small planetary disc, which eventually proved to be that of the precise body he had been in search of during two months. The controversy that ensued had its ignominious side; but it was entered into by neither of the parties principally concerned. Adams bore the disappointment, which the dilatory proceedings at Greenwich and Cambridge had inflicted upon him, with quiet heroism. His silence on the subject of what another man would have called his wrongs remained unbroken to the end of his life;[222] and he took every opportunity of testifying his admiration for the genius of Leverrier. Personal questions, however, vanish in the magnitude of the event they relate to. By it the last lingering doubts as to the absolute exactness of the Newtonian Law were dissipated. Recondite analytical methods received a confirmation brilliant and intelligible even to the minds of the vulgar, and emerged from the patient solitude of the study to enjoy an hour of clamorous triumph. For ever invisible to the unaided eye of man, a sister-globe to our earth was shown to circulate, in perpetual frozen exile, at thirty times its distance from the sun. Nay, the possibility was made apparent that the limits of our system were not even thus reached, but that yet profounder abysses of space might shelter obedient, though little favoured, members of the solar family, by future astronomers to be recognised through the sympathetic thrillings of Neptune, even as Neptune himself was recognised through the tell-tale deviations of Uranus. It is curious to find that the fruit of Adams's and Leverrier's laborious investigations had been accidentally all but snatched half a century before it was ripe to be gathered. On the 8th, and again on the 10th of May, 1795, Lalande noted the position of Neptune as that of a fixed star, but perceiving that the two observations did not agree, he suppressed the first as erroneous, and pursued the inquiry no further. An immortality which he would have been the last to despise hung in the balance; the feather-weight of his carelessness, however, kicked the beam, and the discovery was reserved to be more hardly won by later comers.