Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/77

 1830-40] ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 59 to which is added an account of the new astronomical ephemeris published at Berlin." * In this it is pointed out that the Nautical Almanac was never solely intended for sailors ; they do not require to know about the eclipses of Jupiter's satel- lites or the places of Mercury or Uranus, etc., so that a sixpenny pamphlet would suffice for them. There are many inaccuracies in the work : invisible occupations or eclipses are marked as visible at Greenwich, or vice versa ; mean places of stars are given in one place different from what they are in another ; February 29 of leap year forgotten in the apparent places of stars, etc. In the same month of 1829 January a Memorandum was (on the 28th) presented to the Chancellor of the Exchequer relative to the expediency of reforming the Nautical Almanac. A month later a motion was made in the House of Commons for the pro- duction of papers connected with the late Board of Longitude and the Nautical Almanac., and on March 17 these were ordered to be printed. They are : the Memorandum of January 28, with a copy of the paper read by John Herschel to the Board of Longitude on 1827 April 5 ; also a Report or reply to the Memorandum, by Young, and finally an account of the expenses of the late Board. The Memorandum states that the Almanac fell into disrepute after Maskelyne's death ; that there were fifty-eight errors in the volume for 1818 and, singularly enough, precisely the same number of errors in that for 1830 ; that it does not contain the lunar distances from the principal planets, nor any occultations ; that the tables of the sun used by the computers are known to be inaccurate ; that accurate places of all the planets (including the four small ones) should be given for every day, etc. It is therefore proposed that a new Board of Longitude should be formed. To all this Young did his best to reply in his " Re- port " ; but there would be no use in going through his attempts to refute the complaints and deny the necessity of adding to the contents of the Almanac. As the Parliamentary Paper naturally did not contain any refutation of Young's reply to the Memorandum, South thought it incumbent on him to publish a " Refutation of the numerous mis-statements and fallacies contained in a paper presented to the Admiralty by Dr. Thomas Young, etc.," viii + 8o pp. The preface is dated April 25. In an appendix are given the Report of 1795 to the French Convention, on the establishment of the Bureau des Longitudes, and the law giving effect to this. The pamphlet is written in South's usual style, very different from the calm and Astronomical Tables and Formulae."
 * London, 1829 January, 24 pp. "Extracted from the Appendix to