Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/140

 n8 HISTORY OF THE [1850-60 of a small mass of metal of known weight and density. This ex- periment had been repeated by Francis Baily, who had obtained a value of 5*67 ; while the Ordnance Survey, by observing the de- flection of the plumb line at Arthur's Seat, got 5*316. Cornu and Bailie found by the torsion balance 5-56 ; while Boys, in his skilful and laborious repetition of the same experiment (1895), using quartz fibres and every possible refinement, got 5*527. On 1855 August 7 there died one of the most loved and respected Fellows of the Society, the Rev. R. Sheepshanks, of whom the Astronomer Royal said, " a man whose equal in talent and persever- ance, in disinterestedness, in love of justice and truth I have scarcely known." He died as the direct result of overwork on a laborious task on which he had been engaged for more than eleven years, the construction of the new standard yard, involving tens of thousands of measurements and comparisons with standards of different lengths, different materials and varying methods of marking the fiduciary points. This work had been determined upon by a Royal Commission in 1843 and had then been entrusted to Baily. He, however, died in 1844, and Sheepshanks took it up and gave unremitting attention to it till his death. Sheepshanks had an extraordinarily skilful eye with the micrometer, and it was stated that his comparisons were " so far superior to those of all preceding experimenters, including Kater and Baily, as to defy all competition on the ground of accuracy." He left the work so far completed that no further measurements were required, and it was subsequently put in form and published by Airy. He was a generous benefactor to the Society and to the University of Cambridge. Eighteen months after his death his sister, carrying out his wishes, though these were not actually embodied in his will, presented all his astronomical and other scientific instruments, now forming forty-three items in the list of instruments in our possession. With all his energy and capacity he was a very modest man, and always refused to be nominated for the office of President, though it was an office for which he was pre-eminently fitted and to which he would have received the warmest welcome both from the Council and from the Fellows. The acceptance of it was, in fact, often pressed upon him. The capture and occupation of Lucknow brought to the notice of astronomers the history and ultimate fate of one of the most short-lived observatories ever established, the one founded by the King of Oude in 1841 and abolished by him, when the new toy had ceased to amuse, in 1848. The observatory was well equipped and furnished with instruments of the first order by Troughton and Simms. A Fellow of the Society, Lt.-Col. Wilcox, had been appointed Director, and the new institution began work under the