Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/90

 72 HISTORY OF THE [1830-40 " the whole establishment ought to be cleared out." * Though Airy acknowledged that " the establishment was in a queer state," he attributed this to Pond's ill-health, to the inefficiency of his first assistant, and to the intolerable amount of business connected with chronometers. This Airy at once got reduced within proper limits, while the first assistant was replaced by a high Cambridge Wrangler (Main), an arrangement continued ever since. The work begun at the Cambridge Observatory was now continued on a larger scale at Greenwich, to the incalculable benefit of astronomy. At the beginning of this decade the only other observatory in the United Kingdom where useful work was going on and was being published, was that at Armagh, where Robinson had commenced re-observing Bradley's stars in 1827. At Dublin (since the retire- ment of Brinkley) and at Oxford " grinding the meridian " was going on most steadily and perse veringly, without the slightest thought of reduction or publication. It was no doubt these two observatories which Airy had in mind when he wrote : ( "In England an observer conceives that he has done everything when he has made an observation. He thinks that the merely noting the passage of a star over one wire and its bisection by another, is all that can be expected from him ; and that the use of a table of logarithms or anything beyond the very first stage of reduction, ought to be left to others." At Oxford this state of things came to an end in 1839, when Johnson was appointed Radcliffe Observer. Of the work done at the Cape Observatory by Henderson we have already spoken. From 1835, valuable observations were both made and regularly published by him at the Edinburgh Observatory. As regards instrumental equipment, the transit instrument and the mural circle reigned supreme in British Observatories. Romer's plan of observing both Right Ascension and Declination with one instrument had at last been imitated by Troughton in the transit circle, which he made for Groombridge in 18064 But he never made another, and a few years later he constructed the first mural circle for Greenwich. Why this form of instrument, large and lopsided, should have become such a favourite in this country, though hardly anywhere else, is difficult to explain ; perhaps it was because it was supposed that in order to lessen the effect of division errors the circle would have to be very large. t ** Report on the progress of Astronomy during the present Century." Second Report of the Brit. Assoc. (1832), p. 184. In a footnote Airy adds that this is, of course, not the character of every English observer. J It had a telescope of 5 feet and a circle 4 feet in diameter. It is, at any rate, something to be thankful for, that the " preposterous " circle (as Newcomb called it) of 8 feet diameter, at Dunsink, was not imitated. It helped to make most of Brinkley's observations useless.
 * Airy's Autobiography (Cambridge, 1896), pp. 109 and 128.