Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/45

 1820- 20-30] ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 29 important as a stimulus to Baily, and therefore to our Society ; and it is tragic that we should have nevertheless some memories of a kind he would specially have deplored. The second point suggested by De Morgan's words is this. We probably follow the bent of his own thoughts in presuming that the opposition encountered by Baily in 1811 in a matter which his own work and experience had shown him to be important, may have acted as a powerful stimulus when he met some of the same opponents later over Nautical Almanac matters. Thomas Young was the Secretary to the Board of Longitude, which had allowed the Nautical Almanac to fall behind the times : and other influential names may have been common to the two controversies. Baily was a stalwart champion, as he showed later, especially in the case of Flamsteed ; and it is possible that our Society benefited to some extent by the warmth which his opponents had stirred within him in 1811, and which had not yet cooled in 1820 when it aided in the hatching of the Astronomical Society. Baily was the backbone of the Society throughout its early years, as we shall be reminded in dealing with the time of his death in 1844 (see third decade), and in the eloge by Sir John Herschel pronounced on that sad occasion ; but we may add here a few details concerning the voyage to America ( 1795-7), which is indeed mentioned in the eloge, but scarcely so as to give a just notion of its character. Indeed, even his intimate friends do not appear to have been aware of what was involved ; though Baily had kept a careful journal he did not apparently talk to them about his experiences. " He was more than commonly reserved in matters relating to himself : and no old soldier was ever more chary of referring to anything which would insinuate dangers faced or hardships endured." So wrote Augustus De Morgan in 1856, in editing the Journal which had been put into his hands. " In the course of fourteen years of intimate acquaintance I never arrived at so much knowledge of his adventures as is contained in the few sentences which formed the sum total of Sir John Herschel's recollections " (this is an allusion to the paragraph in the eloge of which mention is made above). " Occasionally, when some thriving city was mentioned, he would say, c When I passed that spot it was all forest,' or the like ; but I never heard him drop a hint that he had calculated, under those trees, the chances of being scalped or starved. From all I knew of the writer, I feel sure that the hardship and the risk are both understated." The risk of our losing even the understatement was also con- siderable. De Morgan, after some consultation with Airy and others, put the journal through the press under the title, Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 and 1797. By