Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/274

 242 HISTORY OF THE [1880-1920 to include papers on astrophysical subjects not connected with eclipses. In this way appendices with double pagination were issued to volumes 58 and 60 to 65 of the Monthly Notices. Though the Fellows were thus supplied with copies of valuable papers which many of them would not otherwise have seen, this arrangement had two drawbacks. It increased the thickness of the volumes, which even without them was rather considerable, and it prevented the index being at the end of the volume. It came to an end when the size of the Proceedings was changed from demy 8vo to royal 8vo. Appendices of similar contents appeared to volumes 54, 55, 57 of the Memoirs. But in 1906 the Council of the Royal Society discontinued the agreement, apparently because they had received many applications from other Societies for the privilege of including Royal Society papers in their publications. They declared themselves ready to consider the question of supplying either series A or B of the Philosophical Transactions direct to members of Societies at a reduced rate, " provided such Society be willing to subscribe on behalf of an adequate proportion of its members." But our Council did not accept this invitation. In 1909 March the Council resolved that the Secretaries be encouraged to insert in the Monthly Notices brief abstracts of papers in the Philosophical Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society. The encouragement thus given appears to have been insufficient, and the short reviews often found in the Monthly Notices sixty to seventy years ago have never been resumed. Apart from its regularly appearing publications, the Society has only on one occasion shared in the printing of an astronomical work. This was in 1910-1912, when the Society joined the Royal Society in publishing " The Scientific Papers of Sir William Herschel," in two large quarto volumes. It had always been felt as a serious desideratum in astronomical literature, that the important papers of W. Herschel had never been collected, but had to be looked for in about forty volumes of the Philosophical Transactions.* But the difficulty of getting a private publisher to undertake the risk of issuing so extensive a work was so great, that nothing was done to realise the no doubt widely spread wish till nearly ninety years after Herschel's death. When an appeal had been made in print, addressed to the R.A.S. and the Royal Society, by Professor See of Calif ornia,f the matter was at length taken up in earnest in the beginning of 1910. A joint Committee was formed, and thanks to the liberality of Sir W. J. Herschel, the grandson and son of two great astronomers, access was given f The Observatory, 32, 473.
 * See, for instance, W. Struve, fitudes d' 'astronomic stellaire, p. 23.