Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/94

 76 HISTORY OF THE [1830-40 in the then recently discovered art of photography. While the telescope was yet standing, John Herschel secured a photograph of it, using a glass negative, which is still in existence and from which paper prints were successfully made many years later. * How many glass negatives have been taken since then to depict the stars and nebulae, first systematically explored by the two Herschels ? It was fitting that what became afterwards a powerful adjunct to astronomical telescopes should first have been fashioned by a Herschel, and should first have been directed to the earliest of modern giant telescopes. Of private observers with more modest instrumental means at their disposal, there were as yet very few. Instruments from the collection formed by the Society were freely lent to such Fellows as were expected to make good use of them. Among the earliest donations to this collection were a 4-foot transit instrument and a small altazimuth, given by the son of Colonel Beaufoy. These were lent to Captain W. H. Smyth, R.N., who had won a name by long-continued hydrographic work in the Mediterranean, and on leaving the sea had settled at Bedford. The altazimuth was soon exchanged for another (by Troughton) presented to the Society by Dr. Lee. But the most important instrument in Smyth's Observatory was an equatoreally mounted refractor by Tulley, of 5-9 inches aperture and nearly 9 feet focal length, mounted in 1830, and supplied with a clock movement designed by Sheep- shanks. With this, Smyth, during the next nine years, measured hundreds of double stars and examined clusters and many of the brighter nebulae. When he had completed these observations, Smyth parted with his telescope to his friend Dr. Lee, who erected it in an observatory he had built at Hartwell House, Bucks. f Here it seerns to have been only occasionally used ; but though never engaged in regular astronomical w r ork, Lee was a generous patron of science on many occasions and very liberal to our Society, as we shall see further on. Another private observatory in the early thirties was that of Thomas Maclear, at that time a physician at Biggleswade, Bed- fordshire, J where he observed and computed occultations and other phenomena. But his activity there was not of long duration, as he was appointed to succeed Henderson at the Cape in 1833. prints, mounted in a frame made from the ladder-rungs of John Herschel's 2O-foot telescope. The negative is in the South Kensington Museum. f Hartwell House had been a very well-known place early in the century, as Louis XVIII. lived there from 1808 to 1814. J Described in Memoirs, 6, 147. It is not a little remarkable that, of four Directors appointed to the Cape Observatory in fifty years (1830-80), three had already acquired a name as amateurs.
 * The writer is indebted to the late Sir W. J. Herschel for one of these