On the ninth day of Christmas

On the ninth day of Christmas
My true love gave to me
Nine ladies dancing, eight maids-a-milking
Seven swans-a-swimming, six geese-a-laying
Five golden rings, four calling birds
Three French hens, two turtle doves
And a partridge in a pear tree.

The discovery of the planet Vulcan was announced on Jan. 2, 1860 at a meeting of the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Vulcan was a small planet proposed to exist in an orbit between Mercury and the Sun. In an attempt to explain peculiarities of Mercury's orbit, in the 19th-century French mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier hypothesized that they were the result of another planet, which he named Vulcan. No such planet was ever found, and Mercury's orbit has now been explained by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Live long and prosper!