Bode's Law and Witt's Planet DQ

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IN comparing the distances of the planets from the sun, it was early thought that there might be some law which would connect these distances together and allow us to calculate them correctly or even approximately. Kepler, as long ago as the beginning of the seventeenth century, thought that he had discovered such a law; but as he could not account for the anomalous space between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, he abandoned the idea “of reconciling the actual state of the planetary system with any theory he could form respecting it, and hazarded the assertion that a planet really existed between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and that its smallness alone prevented it from being visible to astronomers.” In the year 1772 Prof. Bode announced a law which gave a curious approximate relation between these distances, although it seems certain that Titius of Wittenberg discovered and formulated it some years previously, pointing out “the existence of a remarkable symmetry in the disposition of the bodies constituting the solar system.” This law was very simple, and amounted to this: If to each of the planets, beginning with the one nearest the sun, the number 4 be given, and to the second, third, fourth, &c, the numbers 3, 6, 12, &c, respectively, be added, then the resulting numbers, divided by ten, approximately give the values for the mean distances of each planet from the sun in terms of the radius of the earth's orbit.