NEW FRONTIERS 303
of financial resources, Weitling nevertheless derived extreme
pleasure from his astronomical labors. Near the close of 1861 he
sent a copy of his work to Dr. Karl Gutzkow, an old acquaintance
of Paris days now living in Weimar, with the request that he pre
serve it so that some day the world might know that he and no one
else was the "discoverer of the correct mechanics of the heavens."
Only an expert astronomer could deal adequately with Weitling's alleged discoveries and point out the errors and the truths in
his calculations and deductions. For purposes of this biography,
the man's passion for investigation, the tremendous amount of
reading which he did in the astronomical field, and the sacrifice
which he was ready to make to satisfy his craving for knowledge
are more important than his mathematics.
By way of summary, however, it may be added that Weitling's
main contentions were that the sun rotates from west to east
around the earth, which in turn moves both from east to west and
swings from north to south between the poles in the form of an
ellipse, on electromagnetic streams which hold all heavenly bodies
in their axes and envelop their atmospheres in a kind of shell. He
held that the earth carried the moon, the sun, Mercury, and Venus
with it in the orbit over which it traveled from east to west, and he
rejected the theory of parallax and concluded that all astronomi
cal distances, except the distance from the earth to the moon, were
based on false calculations and assumptions. In his seventy-five-
page manuscript, entitled "The Mechanic of the Heavens," he
developed these theories and reviewed in detail the claims of other
astronomers. In another manuscript, written in 1865 and entitled
"The Size of the Earth," he calculated laboriously that the diam
eter of the earth at the equator was 7,920 "English miles" and its
circumference, 24,881 miles; he contended that the sun was nearer
the earth by one sixtieth than all other astronomers had figured;
and he accused the professionals of inventing "aberration of light"
to save their honor and cover their mistakes, "with foreign and
artificial terms."
According to Weitling, his efforts to invent a buttonhole ac-