A. MATHEMATICS AND ASTRONOMY. 59 



cf the transit arrived, the "probabilities" were set at de- 

 fiance by the weather at Yokohama being finer than at Na- 

 gasaki. 



What the public now have to look forward to is the final 

 result of all these expeditions ; and this is something which 

 we regret to find there is no immediate prospect of learning. 

 No nation has yet made any official publication even of its 

 observations. The fact is that the observing parties have 

 brought home an immense mass of material, the working up 

 of which requires much consideration and great labor. The 

 greatest accuracy must be sought after at every step, and 

 any attempt to push through the complicated operations 

 which are necessary so as to obtain immediate results would 

 be entirely futile. In order to compare the times of the ob- 

 servations in the two hemispheres the longitudes of all the 

 stations must be known. Observations for this purpose were 

 made by the parties ; but to calculate the results is a much 

 slower and more difficult process than to make the observa- 

 tions. Another tedious work will be the reading of the pho- 

 tographic negatives. The computation of the contact ob- 

 servations will be easier; indeed, a French mathematician has 

 actually published a result (8.87" for the solar parallax) from 

 the observations of a single pair of stations. But a result 

 of this sort is hardly better than guess-work; and, as it is 

 said that the other results of the French observations are 

 different, we may fear that the above result was published 

 only because it came out about right. Altogether, we fear 

 it will be two or three years before the observations by each 

 nation are worked up ready for publication ; and when this is 

 done, it will only furnish the data from which some mathe- 

 matician will deduce the final result. Even then every 

 thing will be carried through much more rapidly than in the 

 case of the transit of 1769, notwithstanding that, ow T ing to 

 the more refined modern methods, the labor of working up 

 the old observations was much less than must be devoted to 

 the recent ones. 



ON THE OBSERVATION OF VARIABLE STARS. 



A second catalogue of variable stars, with valuable notes 

 relating thereto, has just been published by Schonfeld, whose 

 first catalogue, in 1866, with the additions of 1868, is already 



