i8 HISTORY OF THE [1820-30 
struck with their recent increase, we hasten to consider the rise 
and progress of similar institutions in the provinces. 
He mentions first the Observatories at Oxford (Radcliffe), 
Dublin, Armagh, Cambridge, and the private Observatories of Mr. 
South and Mr. Herschel, commenting adversely and emphatically 
on the fact that “ no public observatory where observations are 
regularly made exists at present in Scotland.” Mention is also 
made of the Ashmolean Society of Oxford, the Literary and 
Philosophical Society of Manchester (1781), the Royal Geological 
Society of Cornwall (1814), the Liverpool Royal Institution (1814), 
the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1819), the Bristol Institu 
tion (1820), the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, and “ many other 
institutions in our provinces, such as those of Newcastle, Bath, 
Leeds, and Exeter.” 
Our Founders 
It seems further desirable to give here a few words about some 
of the men who founded the Society. About a few of them infor 
mation is already available in plenty, as, for instance, in the case 
of Sir William Herschel, the first nominal President of the Society, 
and there is no need to say more here ; but the case is somewhat 
different with the second President—the first who actually filled 
the Chair, H. T. Colebrooke. His name may be quite unfamiliar 
to most astronomers, and yet he was a very remarkable man. He 
died in 1837 after some years of suffering both bodily and mental, 
and our Monthly Notices of the time ( 4 , 108) give little beyond a 
reference to a short Memoir in the Annual Report of the Royal 
Society. But the essay by Max Müller, which appeared in the 
Edinburgh Review for October 1872, and was reprinted in Chips 
from a German Workshop, and in the Biographical Essays (Long 
mans, 1884), enables us to form some estimate of the intellectual 
stature of Colebrooke. Max Müller calls him the “Founder and 
father of true Sanskrit scholarship in Europe,” and remarks with 
some bitterness that if he had lived in Germany his name would 
have been written in letters of gold on the walls of academies ; but 
that in England, though we may hear the popular name of Sir 
William Jones, we hear not one word of the infinitely more impor 
tant achievements of Colebrooke. 
To show that this is not a careless comparison, he returns to 
it at the end of his essay, and deliberately declares that, “ as 
Sanskrit scholars, Sir William Jones and Colebrooke cannot be 
compared. Sir William had explored a few fields only, Colebrooke 
had surveyed almost the whole domain of Sanskrit literature.”