Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/244

 CHAPTER VII 1880-1920. (By J. L. E. DREYER) THE history of the Society during the last forty years cannot yet be written in detail. The events are too recent, and most of those who were prominent members of the Society during the greater part of this period are still living, so that comments on their acts in a book published by the Society would be inappro- priate. It must also be acknowledged that however fruitful the labours of the Society at large and of many individual members have been since 1880, and however vast the strides made by Science have been, the course run by the Society has been very smooth. When once the storm raised by the movement for " Endowment of Research " had subsided, its history was quite free from exciting episodes or controversies, which would supply good material to a historical writer. For these reasons it has been decided not to deal separately with each of the last four decades, but to treat these forty years as one period, and chiefly to review those doings of the Council on behalf of the Society of which little or no printed record is accessible to the Fellows. After that we shall sketch what may be called the internal history of the Society and its publications. Owing to the enormous development of Astronomy in recent years and the great increase in the number of publications, we are not able in the limited space of this record to review the history of the Society in its connection with the progress of our science in the same detail as was done for the first sixty years of the century. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the invention of the telescope supplied astronomers with an instrument which not only made it possible to get some idea of the nature of the heavenly bodies, but also very greatly increased the accuracy of observations of their positions. It is not too much to say that the rise of celestial photography towards the end of the nineteenth century effected an equally great revolution in Astronomy, though 212