Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/127

 1840-50] ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 105 Lassell's 24-inch speculum, and discovering Hyperion, Saturn's 8th satellite, simultaneously with him. But the Council says, credit to the energy of Americans, is the erection of an equatoreal telescope of 12 inches aperture (by Merz, of Munich) at the thriving and spirited town of Cincinnati. The funds were obtained by sub- scription from individual citizens on the solicitation of Mr. O. M. Mitchel, who has undertaken the charge of the Observatory. . . . If as much skill be displayed in working the instrument as has been shown in procuring it, the Observatory of Cincinnati will soon be celebrated among its compeers." W. C. Bond was made an Associate in 1849 January, the first American added to the list, and, as Herschel said, " not long to be the only one of his countrymen by whom that honour is enjoyed." Next year the Council announced that they felt it their duty to increase the list of Associates by the addition of names from the United States, adding that the very great impulse given to astronomy in that part of the world within the last few years will ultimately demand many acknowledgments of the same kind. The names added were B. Peirce, A. D. Bache, O. M. Mitchel, and S. C. Walker. Peirce was at the time best known for his celebrated dilemma, that Neptune, as discovered, was not the planet of prediction, since its perturbations of Uranus were of a very different character from those contemplated, and was, moreover, explicitly excluded because it did not conform to the limits of distance which Le Verrier had laid down. Bache was Director of the U.S. Coast Survey, and had communicated their first experiences with an electro-chronograph. Airy seized the idea at once, " apparently suggested by the obvious practicability of applying the galvanic telegraph (so extensively used in America) to the determination of differences of longitude," and made plans for the chronograph, governed by a conical pendulum, which has run so long at Green- wich. He remarks : " The Americans of the United States, although late in the field of astronomical enterprise, have now taken up that science with their characteristic energy, and have already shown their ability to instruct their former masters." Among other evidences of this energy which are forthcoming in the period under review are an expedition to Chile for the purpose of observing Venus and Mars and determining the solar parallax by comparison with concurrent European observations, and the discovery of a comet by Miss Maria Mitchel, of Nantucket. The Cape. The Society was by this time a convenient medium of exchange for astronomical ideas from all over the world. The foregoing passages by no means exhaust the references to the United States. Another source from which interesting news and
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