We must be pardoned here for making a little remark which, however,
astronomers and other scientific men of sanguine temperament would do
well to ponder over. An observer cannot be too cautious in announcing to
the public his discovery when it is of a nature purely speculative.
Nobody is obliged to discover a planet, or a comet, or even a satellite,
but, before announcing to the world that you have made such a discovery,
first make sure that such is really the fact. Because, you know, should
it afterwards come out that you have done nothing of the kind, you make
yourself a butt for the stupid jokes of the lowest newspaper scribblers.
Belfast had never thought of this. Impelled by his irrepressible rage
for discovery--the _furor inveniendi_ ascribed to all astronomers by
Aurelius Priscus--he had therefore been guilty of an indiscretion highly
un-scientific when his famous telegram, launched to the world at large
from the summit of the Rocky Mountains, pronounced so dogmatically on
the only possible issues of the great enterprise.

The truth was that his telegram contained _two_ very important errors:
1. Error of _observation_, as facts afterwards proved; the Projectile
_was_ not seen on the 13th and _could_ not have been on that day, so
that the little black spot which Belfast professed to have seen was most
certainly not the Projectile; 2. Error of _theory_ regarding the final
fate of the Projectile, since to make it become the Moon's satellite was
flying in the face of one of the great fundamental laws of Theoretical
Mechanics.

Only one, therefore, the first, of the hypotheses so positively
announced, was capable of realization. The travellers--that is to say if
they still lived--might so combine and unite their own efforts with
those of the Lunar attraction as actually to succeed at last in reaching
the Moon's surface.