Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/29

. 1 820- 20-30] ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 15 innocent of Astronomy, but they include some very respectable names, especially that of the Secretary : BOARD OF LONGITUDE, 1820 J. W. Croker, S.A. S. P. Rigaud. ' Jos. Banks, P.R.S. Isaac Milner. Davies Gilbert. Samuel Vince. Rob. Woodhouse. W. Lax. John Pond, Ast.R. W. H. Wollaston. A. Robertson. W. Mudge. THOS. YOUNG, Secretary. With the rebuff encountered by the new Society in our minds, we read these names with surprise, and may reflect on the justice of the saying that a Board or Committee is apt to combine not the wisdom but the folly of the members, or shall we modify it by substituting " not the activity but the inertia." It is a pleasure to contrast the conduct of the R.A.S. Council, which set about calculating and printing the requisite ephemerides for 1823. Such work was followed up until it resulted in Rally's Catalogue of nearly 3000 fixed stars (Mem. R.A.S., 2, Appendix) with the " star constants " a, b, c, d, etc., and day constants for every tenth day for the years 1826-30, a really magnificent achieve- ment for a Society (indeed, almost for an individual member of that Society) in the face of official laxity and discouragement. This method of computing " star corrections " is now so familiar that we find it difficult to imagine the state of affairs before Baily introduced it into England and ultimately into the Nautical Almanac for 1834, which was " constructed in strict conformity with the recommendations of the ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY of London " a great triumph for the Society, of which more will be said in the next chapter. Baily did not invent the method, he took it from Bessel and Schumacher, with a modification of his own for which he offers the following reason * : It may be proper here to state that the values denoted in the present tables by A, B, C, D, are denoted by M. SCHUMACHER C, D, A, B respectively. But, in the choice of characters to represent given quantities, it is desirable that we should, as much as possible, make them serve the purpose of an artificial memory. It is on this account that I have made A, B represent the quantity by which the A Berration is determined ; C the quantity by which the preCession is determined ; and D the quantity by which the Deviation, or (as it is now more generally called) the nutation, is determined. The reason seems a good one, and it is perhaps a pity that the
 * Mem. R.A.S., 2, xxx, footnote.