Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/73

 1830- 4 o] ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 55 South was in the habit of strolling up and down his garden in the evening, shouting his grievances at the top of his voice to some friend, while people from the neighbourhood were regularly enjoying themselves on the other side of the wall by listening to his ravings. This was certainly easier than to use a large telescope to try to rival the excellent work done by Struve. Fortunately he did not destroy the object-glass, but presented it to the Univer- sity of Dublin in 1863, when Lord Rosse was installed as Chancellor of the University. A few years later it was mounted as an equatoreal at Dunsink. We have given a rather full account of this affair of South's telescope, although it only indirectly concerned our Society, as the details of it are but little known and, for the sake of Troughton's reputation, deserve to be put in a proper light. This is the more necessary, as South had a good name as a practical astronomer ; and it should therefore not be forgotten that his charge against Troughton of having failed to make a proper mounting for a 1 9-foot telescope was not justified. Of course, his contemporaries knew when he was not to be taken seriously ; so that for instance his grave accusations against the President and Council of the Royal Society in 1830 were quietly ignored.* We shall close this account of his vagaries by quoting the following characteristic anecdote about him. Writing in 1836, De Morgan describes how, in the course of a lecture at the Royal Institution " by a starlight Knight," the audience were told " how George III., surrounded by his astronomers, went to Kew to see an occupation, forgoing the stag-hunt which was going on ; how a cloud hid the moon, and how the pious King, without a single murmur against Providence (a point dwelt upon as remarkable), turned the telescope at the hunters, and saw the stag killed between the two horizontal 2. While the Society was waiting for its Charter, the help of the Council was asked by the Admiralty on a most important subject, the reform of the Nautical Almanac. The Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris had appeared since the year 1767. It was " published by order of the President and Council of the Royal Society," is dated 1830 November u. He says he had promised to write a book on the subject, but the unceasing attention which the erection of his large equatoreal had demanded, had pre- vented it. f Memoir of De Morgan, p. 82 (in a letter to Peacock). There are two other versions of the story in R. H. Scott's " History of the Kew Observatory," Proc R. S., 39, 45. Either the occultation took place in the daytime, or the stag-hunt in the night.
 * Weld's Hist, of the R. Soc., 2, 457- South's pamphlet, Charges against