7 6 
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.j* 
Here it seems to have been only occasionally used ; but though 
never engaged in regular astronomical work, 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.§ 
* The writer is indebted to the late Sir W. J. Herschel for one of these 
prints, mounted in a frame made from the ladder-rungs of John Hersehel’s 
20-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.