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the apparent diameter of the sun is about half degree of arc, one-twelfth would be about two and one-half minutes or one hundred and fifty seconds. Mercury's apparent diameter, when in transit, averages about twelve seconds, depending on its distance of the moment, so this thing, if it be considered an intra- Mercurial planet, must have had an actual size of more than twenty times that of Mercury, that is, a diameter of 60,000 miles or so. Obviously such a thing as large as Saturn does not exist in any intra- Mercurial orbit. What then, was it? And how far away? At the gravitational neutral the apparent diameter of two and one-half minutes would represent a real dameter of two hundred miles or less. Again, it seems unlikely that a thing so large would penetrate the earth-moon system without causing some noticeable disturbance — so, again, what and how far? At eight hundred miles it would have to be only about a mile in diameter to appear that big, and we are getting used to the idea of something a mile or so in diameter and a few hundred miles away. Between the first and fifth of May, 1764, Hoffman saw with the naked eye a large round spot, one-fifth the diameter _of the sun, traverse it slowly from north to south. That is a direction of motion almost unheard of in the solar system, except, perhaps, for a few maverick comets. It looks like controlled motion. The size is comparable to that of Lichtenberg's object, and the difference is no greater than would be apparent with an object between earth and moon shifting its position with the changing location of the gravitational neutral. On June 17, 1777, Messier, cataloguer of Nebulae and Star Clusters, saw a number of little bodies crossing the sun very rapidly and in parallel directions. D'Angos, at Tarbes, France, saw a slightly elliptical, sharply defined spot on the sun, about halfway between the edge ad center, which took about twenty-five minutes to pass off the disc. That was on January 18, 1798. This movement is about eight minutes of arc in twenty-five minutes of time, and at a distance of 1,000 miles this would represent a speed of about one-mile in ten minutes or six miles per hour. At 10,000 miles it would be sixty miles per hour, and at 100,000 miles it would be about six hundred miles per hour and at 1,000,000 miles distance it would be speeding at 6,000 miles per hour. No data are available regarding its apparent size, but if it was ten seconds in diameter, just comfortable for visibility in a small telescope, its diameter in miles would be about 1/500,000 of whatever distance you might assign to it. GREAT ARK The next celestial event m our roster is unusually pertinent to our theme, and must have been startling when it was first published. On October 10, 1802, at Madgeburg, Fritch saw a spot moving two minutes of arc in four minutes of time, across the sun and not seen again after a cloudy spell. Near the sun, e.g., in a deep intra-Mercurial orbit, this indicates a velocity of 15,000-20,000 miles per minute. Fritch also states that on March 20, 1800, and February 7, 1802, he saw spots having rapid motions of their own. In hundred of hours in the dusty tomes of the Library of Congress, that is the first case | have found where a scientist has state clearly that these objects were free-lance agents. Even so he seems to have been imbued with the idea that they were near the sun, or in dher words, in intra- Mercurial orbits — at any rate not adjuncts of the third planet and its satellite. This seems to be a statement of controlled motion, but Fritch said it in 1802, and Fritch was an astronomer! On January 6, 1818, two Englishmen, Capel Lofft and a Mr. Acton saw a small subelliptical, opaque spot moving more rapidly over the sun than Venus moves when in transit. It disappeared before sunset and seemed to be of either cometary or planetary appearance. This is a well attested instance of observation by two men who were sober and reliable. 139 THE RETURN OF THE GREAT ARK. GREAT ARKS GRAND-TOUR