Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/68

 52 HISTORY OF THE [1830-40 to withdraw on account of being unable to attend, the names of Tiarks and Sheepshanks were substituted. At the Special General Meeting the same day the Charter was read, after which Baily quitted the Chair. " Sir James South, as the President named in the Charter, was then called for to take the Chair, and on its being ascertained that he was not present, it was resolved that Mr. Bryan Donkin be requested to preside," which he did. The Bye-laws were then read and submitted in sections for approval, after which the new Council was re-elected with the two modi- fications mentioned.* South never again served on the Council, and after some years never appeared at the meetings of the Society. At the General Meeting in 1834, when no medal was awarded, he moved that the Council be recommended to give a gold medal to Stratford for the reconstructed Nautical Almanac ; but an amendment was passed, censuring the irregularity of this motion. This was probably the last appearance of South at any meeting of a Society with many of whose members he was now at open feud. The cause of this was his quarrel with the firm of Troughton & Simms and the law-suit arising out of it. As this created a great deal of sensation and has been much misrepresented by South, it seems desirable to give a short account of it here.f South after doing good work with smaller instruments, chiefly on double stars, erected an Observatory at Camden Hill, Kensing- ton, about 1826. In 1829 he secured what was then the largest object-glass in existence, made by Cauchoix, of nf inches aperture and 19 feet focal length. He entrusted Troughton with the task of constructing a mounting, and had a large dome built for it.J In the autumn of 1831, when the mounting was nearly finished, presenting the medal to Kater, whose invention of the vertical collimator he " damned with faint praise." In the Memoir of Aug. De Morgan, p. 43, is a quotation from a letter (undated) from Smyth to De Morgan, in which he hopes " that the Council will take effectual steps to repel every disorderly attempt to impute motives or impugn its conduct " ; but no particulars are given. t In addition to the Memoir of De Morgan, the sources of the following account are, first, a pamphlet entitled A Letter to the Board of Visitors of the Greenwich R. Observatory in Reply to the Calumnies of Mr Babbage, by the Rev. R. Sheepshanks : London, 1854; 37pp., 8vo. Secondly, the privately printed correspondence between South and Troughton & Simms, from 1832 May 16 to 1833 June 26, 84 pp. 8vo, interleaved and with thirty blank pages at the end ; bound in boards. There is no title-page, but on the first page is the word " Appendix " in big letters, which word also forms the heading on every page. At the beginning South has written, " Most confidential." $ The telescope was erected on a temporary stand at the end of January 1 830, and on February 13, John Herschel discovered with it the sixth star of the trapezium in the nebula of Orion. On the morning of May 14, Comet I. 1830 and Uranus, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn were viewed with the " 2o-feet achromatic " (see Monthly Notices, 1, pp. 153 and 180-181).
 * South had shown his ill -humour already at the February meeting, when