Notes

Abstract

IT will be welcome news to astronomers throughout the world to hear that the Board of Visitors of the Royal Observatory have determined to ask the Government to grant the sum of 5,000/. to enable photographic observations to be made of the approaching Transit of Venus. It is a matter of wonder that now, when the labours of De la Rue and Rutherford have brought this most perfect means of astronomical record to a pitch of perfection which it is scarcely needful to surpass, it is still ignored in official observatories. In the matter of the Transit of Venus, it will more than double the chances of success, and Mr. Rutherford has shown that in other inquiries it enables an only moderately skilled person to do in a month what a Bessel would require years to compass by the old method. There is no doubt that the appeal to Government will be successful. Would that we had a Physical Observatory and a Board of Visitors to look after other phenomena which we are now neglecting, the observation of which is even of more importance in the present state of science than that of any number of Transits of Venus !