59 
1830-40] ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 
to which is added an account of the new astronomical ephemeris 
published at Berlin.” * In this it is pointed out that the 
Nautical Almanac was never solely intended for sailors ; they 
do not require to know about the eclipses of Jupiter’s satel 
lites or the places of Mercury or Uranus, etc., so that a 
sixpenny pamphlet would suffice for them. There are many 
inaccuracies in the work : invisible occultations or eclipses are 
marked as visible at Greenwich, or vice versa ; mean places of 
stars are given in one place different from what they are in 
another ; February 29 of leap year forgotten in the apparent 
places of stars, etc. 
In the same month of 1829 January a Memorandum was (on 
the 28th) presented to the Chancellor of the Exchequer relative 
to the expediency of reforming the Nautical Almanac. A month 
later a motion was made in the House of Commons for the pro 
duction of papers connected with the late Board of Longitude 
and the Nautical Almanac, and on March 17 these were ordered to 
be printed. They are : the Memorandum of January 28, with a 
copy of the paper read by John Herschel to the Board of Longitude 
on 1827 April 5 ; also a Report or reply to the Memorandum, 
by Young, and finally an account of the expenses of the late Board. 
The Memorandum states that the Almanac fell into disrepute 
after Maskelyne’s death ; that there were fifty-eight errors in the 
volume for 1818 and, singularly enough, precisely the same number 
of errors in that for 1830 ; that it does not contain the lunar 
distances from the principal planets, nor any occultations ; 
that the tables of the sun used by the computers are known 
to be inaccurate ; that accurate places of all the planets (including 
the four small ones) should be given for every day, etc. It is 
therefore proposed that a new Board of Longitude should be 
formed. To all this Young did his best to reply in his “ Re 
port ” ; but there would be no use in going through his attempts 
to refute the complaints and deny the necessity of adding to the 
contents of the Almanac. 
As the Parliamentary Paper naturally did not contain any 
refutation of Young’s reply to the Memorandum, South thought 
it incumbent on him to publish a “ Refutation of the numerous 
mis-statements and fallacies contained in a paper presented to the 
Admiralty by Dr. Thomas Young, etc.,” viii80 pp. The preface 
is dated April 25. In an appendix are given the Report of 1795 
to the French Convention, on the establishment of the Bureau 
des Longitudes, and the law giving effect to this. The pamphlet 
is written in South’s usual style, very different from the calm and 
* London, 1829 January, 24 pp. “Extracted from the Appendix to 
Astronomical Tables and Formulæ.”