Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/84

 66 HISTORY OF THE [1830-40 took ten months to prepare their Report, which is printed in volume 5 of the Memoirs. They recommended various tables, including a six-figure table of logarithms, which might form a second part to be sold separately. It is stated in the Annual Report of 1833 February that the Admiralty had directed a set of tables to be computed in accordance with the proposal of the Committee, but it does not appear that a new edition was brought out at that time. Another question, about which the Society was consulted by the Admiralty, was whether, considering the great expense, it was necessary to keep up two observatories in the southern hemisphere, nearly on the same parallel of latitude. These were the Royal Observatory at the Cape and the Paramatta Observatory. The latter had been founded as a private observatory by Sir Thomas Brisbane, and was handed over to the British Government in 1826. The question had already been raised in 1828, when the Royal Society had been consulted and had asked advice from the Astro- nomical Society. The latter had then declared the two observa- tories to be necessary ; the Cape Observatory as being nearly on the same meridian as the principal observatories of Europe, and that at Paramatta as differing so much in longitude and climate as to be a useful check on the other one. It was pointed out that the southern heavens were very imperfectly known, and that a fixed station on the Australian continent would be of importance for geographical and hydrographic surveys. This opinion was now (1830 December) adhered to, and it was also pointed out that a great deal of money had been spent on the Cape Observatory, which would be wasted if it were given up. If economy could not be recommended on that occasion, it was duly taken into account in the following year when the Rev. T. J. Hussey asked the Admiralty for 300 or 400 to erect a suitable building to house his instruments at Hayes, in Kent. This the Council could not recommend, though they recognised that Hussey was an active observer, who possessed some valuable instruments.* The Admiralty was not the only Government Department which showed its confidence in the Council by consulting it in a in the second of which he approved of Bianchini's rotation-period of Venus of twenty -three days. He had a 6-inch refractor by Fraunhofer, and was the only English observer who made one of the star-maps between 15 Decl. published by the Berlin Academy. Hussey's Hora XIV. was one of the first of the maps to be issued. He duly entered on this -map a star which had been observed by Lalande in 1 795 ; but he did not notice that the star was not there in 1832. It was Neptune ! Harding had done the same in 1810. Curiously enough, Hussey was one of the first to consider the possibility of finding the planet which disturbed the motion of Uranus (cf. Memoirs, 16, 387).
 * Hussey only communicated two short notes to the Society (M.N., 1 and 2),