52 
HISTORY OF THE 
[1830-40 
to withdraw on account of being unable to attend, the names of 
Tiarks and Sheepshanks were substituted. At the Special General 
Meeting the same day the Charter was read, after which Baily 
quitted the Chair. “ Sir James South, as the President named 
in the Charter, was then called for to take the Chair, and on its 
being ascertained that he was not present, it was resolved that 
Mr. Bryan Donkin be requested to preside,” which he did. The 
Bye-laws were then read and submitted in sections for approval, 
after which the new Council was re-elected with the two modi 
fications mentioned.* 
South never again served on the Council, and after some years 
never appeared at the meetings of the Society. At the General 
Meeting in 1834, when no medal was awarded, he moved that the 
Council be recommended to give a gold medal to Stratford for 
the reconstructed Nautical Almanac ; but an amendment was 
passed, censuring the irregularity of this motion. This was 
probably the last appearance of South at any meeting of a Society 
with many of whose members he was now at open feud. The 
cause of this was his quarrel with the firm of Troughton & Simms 
and the law-suit arising out of it. As this created a great deal of 
sensation and has been much misrepresented by South, it seems 
desirable to give a short account of it here.f 
South after doing good work with smaller instruments, chiefly 
on double stars, erected an Observatory at Camden Hill, Kensing 
ton, about 1826. In 1829 he secured what was then the largest 
object-glass in existence, made by Cauchoix, of nf inches aperture 
and 19 feet focal length. He entrusted Troughton with the task 
of constructing a mounting, and had a large dome built for it.J 
In the autumn of 1831, when the mounting was nearly finished, 
* South had shown his ill-humour already at the February meeting, when 
presenting the medal to Kater, whose invention of the vertical collimator he 
“ damned with faint praise.” In the Memoir of Aug. De Morgan, p. 43, is 
a quotation from a letter (undated) from Smyth to De Morgan, in which he 
hopes “ that the Council will take effectual steps to repel every disorderly 
attempt to impute motives or impugn its conduct ” ; but no particulars are 
given. 
f In addition to the Memoir of De Morgan, the sources of the following 
account are, first, a pamphlet entitled A Letter to the Board of Visitors of the 
Greenwich R. Observatory in Reply to the Calumnies of Mr Babbage, by the Rev. 
R. Sheepshanks: London, 1854; 37 pp., 8vo. Secondly, the privately printed 
correspondence between South and Troughton & Simms, from 1832 May 16 
to 1833 June 26, 84 pp. 8vo, interleaved and with thirty blank pages at the 
end ; bound in boards. There is no title-page, but on the first page is the 
word “ Appendix ” in big letters, which word also forms the heading on 
every page. At the beginning South has written, “ Most confidential.” 
J The telescope was erected on a temporary stand at the end of January 
1830, and on February 13, John Herschel discovered with it the sixth star of the 
trapezium in the nebula of Orion. On the morning of May 14, Comet I. 
1830 and Uranus, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn were viewed with the “ 20-feet 
achromatic ” (see Monthly Notices, 1 , pp. 153 and 180-181).