Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/201

 1870-80] ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 173 Council in November 1871, the names of Mr. Lockyer and Dr. Frankland were proposed as recipients by Mr. De la Rue, and seconded by Mr. Browning, for their joint researches in Solar Physics and the Spectra of Gaseous Bodies. The names of other astronomers were proposed, and of these Professor Schiaparelli was selected at the December Meeting and received the medal at the Annual General Meeting in 1872 Febmary, for his Researches on the Connection between the Orbits of Comets and Meteors. Beyond the communications relating to the arrangements for the eclipse of 1870 and the reports of the results, there was rather a scarcity of papers read before the Society in the years 1870 and 1871. Mr. Proctor was the largest contributor, and there are more than twenty papers by him in these two years. The star Eta Argus, and alleged changes in the nebula surrounding it, formed the subject of several communications in 1871. A noteworthy paper by Professor Alexander Herschel will be found in the Monthly Notices for June of that year, which expounded an idea conceived by his brother, Captain Herschel, for the automatic registration of transits, and gives his own (Pro- fessor A. Herschel's) plan for carrying this out mechanically. The method of this apparatus is in effect precisely that of the type of registering transit micrometer brought into use twenty years later, in which the wire is moved by mechanical means, with the useful addition that a means was provided for the observer to suppress the record of a contact if he were not satisfied that the coincidence of the wire and star was perfect. The Society lost by death three distinguished Fellows in the year 1871 : Sir John Herschel, Mr. Babbage, and Professor De Morgan, the two first-named were the last survivors of those who met at the Freemasons' Tavern in 1820 January to consider the expediency of establishing an Astronomical Society. At the Annual General Meeting in 1872 February, Professor Cayley was elected President, Mr. Huggins retired from the Secretaryship, and Mr. Proctor was chosen to succeed him. The following session, March-June, was remarkable for a dis- cussion, or series of discussions, in the Council. The subject found its way later into the public press under the heading of Government Aid to Science, or the Endowment of Research, and though action was not taken at this time, the proposal made to the Society in this session may be considered to have resulted in the establish- ment of the Observatory at South Kensington, which later on played such a large part in the development of Astrophysics. The matter was initiated by Lieut. -Colonel Strange, the Foreign Secretary, who had been a distinguished officer of the Indian Trigonometrical Survey, and had retired from the army in 1861.