1830-40] ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 
55 
South was in the habit of strolling up and down his garden in the 
evening, shouting his grievances at the top of his voice to some 
friend, while people from the neighbourhood were regularly- 
enjoying themselves on the other side of the wall by listening to 
his ravings. This was certainly easier than to use a large telescope 
to try to rival the excellent work done by Struve. Fortunately 
he did not destroy the object-glass, but presented it to the Univer 
sity of Dublin in 1863, when Lord Rosse was installed as Chancellor 
of the University. ’A few years later it was mounted as an 
equatoreal at Dunsink. 
We have given a rather full account of this affair of South’s 
telescope, although it only indirectly concerned our Society, as 
the details of it are but little known and, for the sake of Troughton’s 
reputation, deserve to be put in a proper light. This is the more 
necessary, as South had a good name as a practical astronomer; 
and it should therefore not be forgotten that his charge against 
Troughton of having failed to make a proper mounting for a 
19-foot telescope was not justified. Of course, his contemporaries 
knew when he was not to be taken seriously ; so that for instance 
his grave accusations against the President and Council of the 
Royal Society in 1830 were quietly ignored.* We shall close this 
account of his vagaries by quoting the following characteristic 
anecdote about him. Writing in 1836, De Morgan describes how, 
in the course of a lecture at the Royal Institution “ by a starlight 
Knight,” the audience were told “ how George III., surrounded by 
his astronomers, went to Kew to see an occultation, forgoing the 
stag-hunt which was going on ; how a cloud hid the moon, and how 
the pious King, without a single murmur against Providence 
(a point dwelt upon as remarkable), turned the telescope at the 
hunters, and saw the stag killed between the two horizontal 
wires.” f 
2. While the Society was waiting for its Charter, the help of 
the Council was asked by the Admiralty on a most important 
subject, the reform of the Nautical Almanac. 
The Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris had 
appeared since the year 1767. It was “ published by order of 
* Weld’s Hist, of the R. Soc., 2 , 457. South’s pamphlet, Charges against 
the President and Council of the Royal Society, ” is dated 1830 November 11. 
He says he had promised to write a book on the subject, but the unceasing 
attention which the erection of his large equatoreal had demanded, had pre 
vented it. 
t Memoir of De Morgan, p. 82 (in a letter to Peacock). There are two other 
versions of the story in R. H. Scott’s “History of the Kew Observatory,” 
Proc R. S., 39 , 45. Either the occultation took place in the daytime, or the 
stag-hunt in the night.