But if the controversy was keen in the old world, we can imagine what
it was like in that portion of the new of which the United States
occupy so vast an area.

A Yankee, we know, does not waste time on the road. He takes the
street that leads him straight to his end. And the observatories of
the American Federation did not hesitate to do their best. If they
did not hurl their objectives at each other's heads, it was because
they would have had to put them back just when they most wanted to
use them. In this much-disputed question the observatories of
Washington in the District of Columbia, and Cambridge in
Massachusetts, found themselves opposed by those of Dartmouth College
in New Hampshire, and Ann Arbor in Michigan. The subject of their
dispute was not the nature of the body observed, but the precise
moment of its observation. All of them claimed to have seen it the
same night, the same hour, the same minute, the same second, although
the trajectory of the mysterious voyager took it but a moderate
height above the horizon. Now from Massachusetts to Michigan, from
New Hampshire to Columbia, the distance is too great for this double
observation, made at the same moment, to be considered possible.

Dudley at Albany, in the state of New York, and West Point, the
military academy, showed that their colleagues were wrong by an
elaborate calculation of the right ascension and declination of the
aforesaid body.

But later on it was discovered that the observers had been deceived
in the body, and that what they had seen was an aerolite. This
aerolite could not be the object in question, for how could an