*4 
HISTORY OF THE 
[1820-30 
may surely be borrowed without impropriety from the Club 
Annals), that on occasions when there was a dinner without a 
meeting of the Society and the Council, the attendance was apt 
to be small. This fact is explicitly deplored in the Annals afore 
said, and from the point of view of the Club, which called these 
meetings specially for the regulation of its own affairs, the regret 
is intelligible. But in compensation we get the knowledge that 
what really attracted these earnest men and brought them together 
was the work : the courageous endeavour to do something not 
only for the Society itself but for Astronomy generally. Round 
the Council table they discussed how to stimulate astronomical 
research by offering prizes ; how to obtain better object glasses for 
telescopes (it will be remembered that the Herschels worked with 
mirrors) ; how to make astronomical tables ; how to arrange 
convenient forms of reduction for observations (we are accustomed 
to associate such forms with Greenwich, and especially with Airy ; 
but Pearson and Baily used them long before Airy); how to mea 
sure the length of the second’s pendulum ; and how to improve 
the Nautical Almanac. When we remember that they had also 
to start the new Society from the cradle, to build up its funds 
and its library, to arrange for the printing of its Memoirs, even 
to find a home for it as mentioned below, we see that there 
was plenty of work for the Council; and it does not need much 
imagination to trace the origin of the earnest spirit which 
fortunately still animates it to those early days when there 
was so much to be done and so little to look back upon as 
achieved. 
A few instances will suffice to illustrate the history of those 
early years. On Thursday, 1820 November 30, the Council met 
at 10 a.m. at Baily’s house to consider a request (signed by South, 
Fallowes, G. Dollond, P. Kelly, B. Donkin) for accurate tables 
of the 45 Greenwich stars for 1822, 1823, 1824. Now that we 
have a “ clock star ” every few minutes, we may well admire the 
restraint of those who pleaded for one every half-hour. The 
actual request was not pressed when the Council promised to do 
its best. According to a report made a week later the main 
obstacle was the indolent Board of Longitude. In the N.A. for 
1822 there is, indeed, a list of the 45 stars, but ephemerides are 
only given for 24 of them, so that there were such gaps as 2 h 28 m 
(a Arietis to Aldebaran) and 3 h i8 m (Regulus to Spica) during 
which an observer could not conveniently find his clock error. 
This state of things continued for several years, the N.A. for 
1826 showing no improvement. Perhaps we may reproduce 
(from the N.A. for 1822) the names of the Board of Longitude. 
From their laxity we should rather expect to find them officials