“Neptune is much nearer the Sun than it ought to be,” is the authoritative way in which a popular historian puts the intruding planet in its place. For the planet failed to justify theory by not fulfilling Bode’s law, which Leverrier and Adams, in pointing out the disturber of Uranus, assumed “as they could do no otherwise.” Though not strictly correct, as not only did both geometers do otherwise, but neither did otherwise enough, the quotation may serve to bring Bode’s law into court, as it was at the bottom of one of the strangest and most generally misunderstood chapters in celestial mechanics. Very soon after Uranus was recognized as a planet, approximate ephemerides of its motion resulted in showing that it had several times previously been recorded as a fixed star. Bode himself discovered the first of these records, one by Mayer in 1756, and Bode and others found another made by Flamstead in 1690. These observations enabled an elliptic orbit to be calculated which satisfied them all. Subsequently others were detected. Lemonnier discovered that he had himself not discovered it several times, cataloguing it as a fixed star. Flamstead was spared a like mortification by being dead. For both these observers had recorded it two or more nights running, from which it would seem almost incredible not to have suspected its character from its change of place. Sixteen of these pre-discovery observations were found (there are now nineteen known), which with those made upon it since gave a series running back a hundred and thirty years, when Alexis Bouvard prepared his tables of the planet, the best up to that time, published in 1821. In doing so, however, he stated that he had been unable to find any orbit which would satisfy both the new and the old observations. He therefore rejected the old as untrustworthy, forgetting that they had been satisfied thirty years before, and based his tables solely on the new, leaving it to posterity, he said, to decide whether the old observations were faulty or whether some unknown influence had acted on the planet. He had hardly made this invidious distinction against the accuracy of the ancient observers when his own tables began to be out and grew seriously more so, so that within eleven years they quite failed to represent the planet. The discrepancies between theory and observation attracted the attention of the astronomic world, and the idea of another planet began to be in the air. The great Bessel was the first to state definitely his conviction in a popular lecture at Königsberg in 1840, and thereupon encouraged his talented assistant Flemming to begin reductions looking to its locating. Unfortunately, in the midst of his labors Flemming died, and shortly after Bessel himself, who had taken up the matter after Flemming’s death.