NEW FRONTIERS 299
and astronomy, and that fact disturbed him. It may also be true
that he sought "escape from this disgraceful earth" because he
became disillusioned by his experiences as a social reformer. His
former European colleague, Moses Hess, went through the same
development in his later years when he wrote The Sun and Its
Light and The History and Physical Composition of Our Plane
tary System* and it will be remembered that Fourier too had his
peculiar theory of the nature of the universe.
At any rate, six months after he left his job at Castle Garden,
Weitling wrote a sixteen-page document, entitled "The Mysteries
of Astronomy, solved by Wilhelm Weitling," and sent a copy for
safekeeping to a friend, James Purdy. The paper, written in Eng
lish, announced the discovery of a "great Idea" that revealed "the
symmetry of the mechanics of heaven." The new mechanics con
tradicted the prevailing notions about the distances of sun and
planets from the earth and from each other but did not challenge
the location of the moon; referred to "an electrical polar power
which affected the rotations and revolutions of the heavenly bodies
by electro-magnetical streams passing through their axes and
forming a kind of elastic and transparent shell around them." It
was obvious that Weitling had become involved beyond his depth
in questions of the aberration of light and parallax, phenomena
that had long been known to astronomers and physicists. He was
so stirred by his discovery that he regarded it as providential,
sacrificed everything "not absolutely essential to the welfare of
my family" to his new interest, and spent the two weeks' vacation
from his duties as registrar of immigrants at home, checking and
rechecking mathematical calculations which fill pages and pages
of his papers. He deeply regretted that he would probably have
to write his definitive work in German because of an inadequate
command of English, and he fully expected scientists and acad
emicians to be skeptical, but he was sure that he, a layman, had
solved "what had appeared to them an everlasting unsolvable
(^4) Zlocisti, Moses Hess, 266.