Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/178

 152 HISTORY OF THE [1860-70 accurate determination of the places of all stars to the ninth magnitude between 2 and +80 declinations was organised by the assignment of the separate 5 zones to various observatories in Europe and America. Nearly ten years passed before the work could be regarded as started in the majority of the zones ; twenty years elapsed before the first instalments of the Catalogue were published. The issue in 1910 of the Berlin C. Catalogue for the zone +70 to +75 declination a zone originally assigned to Dorpat completed the plan contemplated at the time of the inception in 1869. Another piece of work, which was put on the Astronomische Gesellschaft's list of desiderata in 1866, was a new reduction of Bradley 's Observations. It was undertaken by Auwers in 1866 and completed in 1876. The results of his laborious undertaking were published in three volumes, which vere issued in the years 1882, 1888, and 1903. It was in 1863 that Huggins and Miller began to publish their spectroscopic investigations of the chemistry of the stars, investi- gations which had been instigated by Bunsen and Kirchhoff's researches in 1859-60. Our Monthly Notices for 1863 March contain a reference over the now well-known initials J. N. L. to a brief note communicated by Huggins and Miller to the Royal Society in February " On the lines in the spectra of some of the fixed stars." This note was a very brief forerunner of their first Memoir in the Philosophical Transactions. Lockyer's reference to it is of interest, as showing at this early date the difference in trend of thought in the new subject of stellar spectroscopy, a subject in which Huggins and Lockyer came in later years to be almost as frequently in disagreement as in agreement. Lockyer's references to the note in question showed full appreciation of Huggins's method of direct comparison of terrestrial and stellar spectra ; he saw, too, the possibilities opened out of gauging the temperatures of the sun and stars, and utilised Bunsen's estimate of the temperature of the oxyhydrogen flame to hazard a guess at a similar temperature for the sun. He added that Huggins and Miller had succeeded in obtaining microscopic photo- graphs of the spectra of Sirius and Capella. In the following number of the Monthly Notices (23, 188), Airy gave a brief note describing the experimental apparatus prepared at the Royal Observatory for the observation of stellar spectra. In this apparatus, ingenious use is made of focal lines formed when an uncollimated beam falls on a prism displaced from the position for minimum deviation. The work was initiated under the charge of James Carpenter, who later collaborated with James Nasmyth in the work on the moon (1874).