1840-50] ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 
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belief, and it is curious to find Herschel in 1847, while exhibiting a 
month’s hourly drawings by Griesbach, recommending, without any 
mention of Schwabe, as “ highly desirable to secure an unbroken 
series of drawings exhibiting a continuous view of the changes in 
the sun’s surface for every day in every year in future, and as near 
an approach to it in past years as can now be recovered. It seems 
high time that some attempt of the kind should be made on a 
systematic and regular plan, as the only probably effectual means 
of arriving at a knowledge of the laws which govern these mysterious 
phenomena, and the periods, if any, which they observe in their 
formation, and thence of elucidating the nature of the sun itself.” 
He goes on to recommend the Society to start what might have 
been the beginning of a Solar Research Union (November 1847). 
But that was for another epoch ; and it is time now that 1840-50 
gave place to 1850-60.