Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/105

 1840-50] ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 87 more than mention can be made here of other greater astronomers in the Society. Herschel during most of this decade was occupied in preparing and publishing his survey of the southern heavens ; he was frequently absent from the meetings and the Council, though several communications show his interest in the Society's affairs, great and small. Airy was at the height of the prestige which he was to retain so long by right of sheer efficiency. His productiveness, the clarity and beautiful form he gave to his numerous contributions, made him invaluable in the meetings. Later, Adams's power made itself felt over his youth and unassuming personality. These men naturally drew the greatest Continental astronomers, Bessel, Hansen, Schumacher, Otto Struve, into close personal relations with the Society by direct communications, by the award of the Medal, by personal visits, or by interesting extracts from private letters read at the meetings. Yet as I see the matter, such men did not constitute the Society, rather they lived upon it. They could have existed as units apart from it ; it was their audience and their stimulus. The Society was the body of ordinary men, trained and judicious enough to appreciate and criticise what was given to them, and to repeat it in some part, humanising the science, bringing with them what bodies of scholars so often lack, the ordinary exacting standards of system and industry learnt in business, and convinced above all, after acquaint- ance with the world outside, that the rewards of astronomy, such as they were, were well worth their pursuit. Of such men, the " talents were solid and sober, rather than brilliant," and Francis Baily may be taken as their perfected type. Baily. Baily died in the year 1844, and at a Special General Meeting convoked to hear a memoir upon his work, it was unani- mously resolved that " the Society feels it impossible to express in adequate terms its obligations to its late President " for he occupied the Chair that year ; but what a resolution was too narrow to convey, Herschel's memoir supplies. Herschel's eloquence, often too florid for our present taste, is here sobered by the evident determination not to miss one lineament of his friend or to distort the sterling character he loved so much by any touch of exaggeration. If we were asked to-day how Baily stood as a scientific man, I suppose it would be held he was rather second-rate. His work has not stood very well. His pendulum work contains serious oversights. The Cavendish experiment seemed to have defeated him when a suggestion from Forbes enabled him to complete it. We owe to him in stellar reduction that unfortunate inversion of Bessel's notation, in which while the formulae are the same, the meaning is different, and which unnecessarily separated British and Con- tinental practice until it was removed from our Nautical Almanac