Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/96

 78 HISTORY OF THE [1830-40 discrepancy. The new edition was printed in volume 4 of the Memoirs.* Of greater interest was Baily's revised edition of Flamsteed' s British Catalogue of Stars, chiefly because it was issued together with Flamsteed's correspondence with his former assistant, Abraham Sharp, giving an account of the repeated difficulties and impediments, mainly due to Newton and Halley, which delayed and almost prevented the printing of the Historia Ccelestis. At the meeting of the Society on 1833 November 8, Baily gave a preliminary account of the contents of these letters, which was printed in volume 3 of the Monthly Notices, 4-10. The whole of the correspondence was then, in 1835, published in Baily's work, An Account of the Rev. John Flamsteed. ... To which is added his British Catalogue of Stars, corrected and enlarged (Ixxiii-f 672 pp., 4to). This publication was objected to in the strongest possible manner by some, who could not believe that Newton, by any possibility, could have been mean or unjust. f Reasonable oppon- ents (like Whewell) were silenced by Baily's reply in the " Supple- ment " which he printed for private circulation in 1837. It was reserved for an incurable hero-worshipper like Brewster to accuse Baily (long after his death) of " a system of calumny and mis- representation." { Expressions like these are the more inexcusable, as Brewster, after reading Baily's preliminary paper in the Monthly Notices, wrote in 1834 February to suggest to Baily that he might prefix a life of Flamsteed to his edition of the British Catalogue, which would afford an excellent opportunity of giving an account of the difference between him and Newton. But posterity, which is often more just than contemporaries, has long ago acquitted Baily of the unjust charge brought against him by the blind and uncritical worshipper of Newton. Baily's further work in the revision of old star-catalogues, from Ptolemy to Hevelius, was completed in the next decade, and published at his own expense as volume 13 of our Memoirs. Perhaps we may allude in passing to the phenomenon known as " Baily's beads," a row of luminous points seen by him at the beginning and end of centrality during the annular eclipse of Sternverzeichniss, Leipzig, 1 894). The resulting star-places are vastly superior to those of the former edition. t When Baily first announced his discovery of the Flamsteed Papers, Ivory called at the Society's rooms to inquire from Epps about their contents and "to express the hope that Mr. Baily was not attacking living persons under the names of Newton and Flamsteed." Ivory passed his life under the impression that secret and unprovoked enemies were at work upon his char- acter. De Morgan, Budget of Paradoxes, p. 345. J Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton, 1, Preface, p. xii. De Morgan, Newton, His Friend, and his Niece, p. 106.
 * Auwers made a complete new reduction of the catalogue (Tobias Mayer's