Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/28

 14 HISTORY OF THE [1820-30 may surely be borrowed without impropriety from the Club Annals), that on occasions when there was a dinner without a meeting of the Society and the Counciirifre attendance was apt to be small... This fact is explicitly deplored in the Annals afore- said, and from the point of view of the Club, which called these meetings specially for the regulation of its own affairs, the regret is intelligible. But in compensation we get the knowledge that what really attracted these earnest men and brought them together was the work : the courageous endeavour to do something not only for the Society itself but for Astronomy generally. Round the Council table they discussed how to stimulate astronomical research by offering prizes ; how to obtain better object glasses for telescopes (it will Toe remembered that the Herschels worked with mirrors); how to make astronomical tables; how to arrange convenient forms of reduction_for observations (we are accustomed to associate such forms with Greenwich, and especially with Airy ; but Pearson and Baily used them long before Airy) ; how to mea- sure the length of the second's pendulum ; and how to improve the Nautical Almanac. When we remember that they had also to start the new Society from the cradle, to build up its funds and its library, to arrange for the printing of its Memoirs, even to find a home for it as mentioned below, we see that there was plenty of work for jthe Council ; and it does not need much imagination to trace the origin of the earnest spirit which fortunately still animates it to those early days when there was so much to be done and so little to look back upon as achieved. A few instances will suffice to illustrate the history of those early years. On Thursday, 1820 November 30, the Council met at 10 a.m. at Baily's house to consider a request (signed by South, Fallowes, G. Dollond, P. Kelly, B. Donkin) for accurate tables of the 45 Greenwich stars for 1822, 1823, 1824. Now that we have a "clock star" every few minutes, we may well admire the restraint of those who pleaded for one every half-hour. The actual request was not pressed when the Council promised to do its best. According to a report made a week later the main obstacle was the indolent Board of Longitude. In the N.A. for 1822 there is, indeed, a list of the 45 stars, but ephemerides are only given for 24 of them, so that there were such gaps as 2 h 28 m (a Arietis to Aldebaran) and 3 h i8 m (Regulus to Spica) during which an observer could not conveniently find his clock error. This state of things continued for several years, the N.A. for 1826 showing no improvement. Perhaps we may reproduce (from the N.A. for 1822) the names of the Board of Longitude. From their laxity we should rather expect to find them officials