300 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
mystery." To add a further touch of the dramatic, he made a
notation in his notebook that the world-shaking idea came to him
on the day when his first child was born.
These are the words of a fanatic, with a somewhat unbalanced,
one-track mind. Small wonder that he spent the rest of his life
bombarding the scientists and the academies with his theories,
convinced that there was a conspiracy against him, and that he
would die without the opportunity to proclaim these new truths
to the world. Weitling's correspondence of the next dozen years
was with men of scientific reputation in all parts of the western
world.
In February, 1856, he wrote a letter to his friend Petersen, in
which he likened his joy at his discovery with Newton's when
the latter came upon the law of gravitation. Yet Newton had en
joyed certain advantages. He was a mathematician, probably rich,
and could count on support in high places, for his name had never
been anathema to the wealthy and he had never been a propa
gandist for communism.^5 From October, 1858, to December,
1860, there is not a single entry in Weitling's notebook. During
that period he was employed at Castle Garden and devoted all his
spare time to his astronomical studies and his patents. Presently,
Weitling was in correspondence with Humboldt, Michel Cheva
lier, l'Institut de France, the Royal Institute in London, an astron
omer in Greenwich, the director of the observatory in Berlin, Sir
John Herschel, Agassiz in Boston, academies in Berlin, Vienna,
Munich, Leipzig, and St. Petersburg, and the Smithsonian Institu
tion in Washington. In all these letters he explained in detail his
new system which restored the earth to the center of the planetary
system which it had occupied under the Ptolemaic astronomy.
A number of his correspondents, including Humboldt, were
courteous enough to reply, but none offered to help publish his
"Mechanic of the Heavens." Weitling had employed a typesetter
who set up a section of his larger work in 1856 and indicated that
the material would constitute pages 195 to 214 of his complete
(^5) Quoted in Schlüter, Anfänge der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 122.