Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/181

 1860-70] ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 153 Here were the beginnings of the introduction of precise spectroscopy into astronomical investigations. Both Huggins and Lockyer, who stood out as the protagonists in the new methods, communicated most of their work to the Royal Society, though the fact that Huggins was one of the Secretaries of our Society from 1867 to 1872 kept him in very close touch with our Society, and he was frequently called upon to speak of the nature and real significance of the harvest of data that were being gathered in the new branch of astronomy to which he devoted his pioneering activities. His clear understanding, both of the power and also of the limitations of the new methods, did much to keep men's minds from jumping to hasty conclusions. Huggins's early stellar investigations were made with spectro- scopes attached to a small equatorial, with an aperture of only 8 inches. They were carried out with such conspicuous success that the Royal Society in 1869 decided to employ a large bequest made to them by Benjamin Oliveira in obtaining " a telescope of the highest power that is conveniently available for spectroscopy and its kindred inquiries. The instrument will, of course, be the property of the Society, and will be intrusted to such persons as, in their opinion, are the most likely to use it to the best advantage for the extension of this branch of science ; and in the first instance there can be but one opinion that the person so selected should be Mr. Huggins." The instrument was made by Sir Howard Grubb, and Stokes, who was then Secretary of the Royal Society, took great interest in the optical questions involved in the con- struction of the object glass. The installation of the new instru- ment provided Huggins with new opportunities, which he utilised to the full in the following decades. Nasmyth's observations of detail on the surface of the sun, communicated to the Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester in 1862, and illustrated by plates which were reproduced at the end of Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy (8th ed., 1865), attracted wide attention ; and Dawes, Hewlett, John Phillips, Stone, De la Rue, and Herschel joined in the lively discussions that followed. So much attention was paid to the description of " entities " that the essential feature of observation namely, the fine-grained inequalities in the luminosity of the sun's surface was in danger of escaping notice. But the discussions served the purpose of calling attention to the study of the sun's surface and in particular to the fine detail to be seen in and around sun-spots. Sir John Herschel introduced Hewlett's beautiful delineations of sun-spots to the notice of the Society. Howlett continued his drawings for about thirty years, and they