A correspondent of Tuesday's Times produced from " Gulliver's Travels"
an apparently very remarkable anticipation of the dis- covery just made as to the satellites of Mars. In "The voyage to Laputa " is a passage stating that the Laputan astron- omers had discovered "two lesser stars as satellites which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outer- most, five ; the former revolves in the space of 10 hours, and the latter 31*." That would be a rough approximation to the truth, if it bad been the outermost, revolving in 31i hours, which had been placed at the distance of three diameters, instead of the innermost ; but as Mr. Proctor points out in Thursday's Times, it was not in Dean Swift's way to make such a guess, and in fact he borrowed it from the science of his day, which, judging from analogy, inferred that because the earth had one satel- lite, and Jupiter four, Mars, which comes between them, ought to have two, and which accounted for these satellites having escaped the astronomers by supposing that they must be near to their primary ; and of course, the same fact accounts for the similar but vaguer prediction of Voltaire. It was in both cases the imagination of the scientific men which suggested the science of the imaginative men.
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