Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/112

 92 HISTORY OF THE [1840-50 Cavendish experiment. In 1844 none was awarded. In 1845, Airy, as President, handed it to W. H. Smyth, then Foreign Secretary, for the Bedford Catalogue ; in 1846, Smyth, as President, handed it to Airy for completing the old Greenwich planetary reductions. As regards this award Smyth remarks, "It is, of course, understood, and has always been acted upon, that work, however excellent and useful, does not enter into competition when it only follows the necessary duty of the author. . . . Now the weighty reductions in question come before us as executed at the expense of Her Majesty's Government by the Astronomer Royal. It remains, however, to be added that the undertaking was proposed by that distinguished individual long before his appoint- ment to Greenwich." The distinction seems a just one, but it was hardly necessary to follow, two years later, by an award of a " Testimonial " to Airy for the parallel lunar reductions, which were not actually completed for publication at the time when action was taken. A Troubled Episode. We now come to a moment when the Society, from the midst of its harmonious activities, was suddenly precipitated into an acute and bitter controversy, which died down again as rapidly as it had arisen, because no facts were in dispute and there was nothing to controvert. We read in 1846 January, " The addition of a new planet to the Solar System is a fact so interesting and important in astronomy, as to require that the numerous com- munications of which it has already been the subject should be treated and discussed in the publications of this Society with a greater regard to classification and arrangement than is necessary, or indeed always practicable, in other cases of less prominent interest. ... It is proposed therefore to give, first, a brief historical notice of its discovery, and of the manner in which the search after it was prosecuted " ; and the next month, among the reports on Observatories, " At Cambridge, the observations of comets and of the new planet have for the present superseded those of double stars." These passages relate to the planet Q Astrsea, dis- covered by Hencke, after a blank of thirty-nine years, the first of a fresh stream that has never since ceased to flow. A little haziness in one's dates might quite well leave the impression that they referred to Neptune. It would have been easily within possibility. In 1841, Adams had "formed a design as soon as possible after taking my degree," of investigating the perturbations of Uranus on the supposition that their unexplained portion was due to the action of an exterior unknown planet. He collected his material, and in the year 1843 he had determined a preliminary place for the body, which was as near the truth as Challis expected his final place to be. The next year he fortified his discussion, and was able