56 Memoir of the late Francis Baily, Esq., F.R.S., 8^c. 



on upwards of eighty pendulums of various forms and mate- 

 rials, by which the new correction is clearly shown to depend 

 not only on the dimensions but on the form and situation of 

 the vibrating body. Independent of the excellence of this 

 paper as a specimen of delicate experimental inquiry and in- 

 duction, in which, to use the expression of one best capable of 

 appreciating and admiring them, his generalizing powers seem 

 to have been held in abeyance till the right moment for their 

 exercise arrived, it had the further merit of bringing into di- 

 stinct notice a number of minute circumstances, chiefly rela- 

 tive to the mode of suspension (important, however, from their 

 influence on results), which it is absolutely necessary to attend 

 to in these delicate and difficult inquiries, if the pendulum be 

 ever again resorted to as a means of verifying or fixing anew 

 the standard of length. 



The return of the Chanticleer In 1831, without its lamented 

 commander, threw the whole task of arranging and digesting 

 for publication Captain Foster's pendulum observations on 

 Mr. Baily — a labour of love, prompted by the warmest friend- 

 ship, and which he executed in the spirit of one determined to 

 erect a monument to the fame of that truly amiable and ta- 

 lented officer, of the most durable and precious materials. 

 His Report on the subject to the Admiralty was presented by 

 the Lords Commisioners to the Council of the Astronomical 

 Society, and printed at the expense of Government as the 

 seventh volume of our Transactions. In this Report the ob- 

 servations are given in full, and with the most scrupulous 

 fidelity, and those at each of the numerous stations discussed 

 with the utmost care. The final re-examination of the pen- 

 dulums in London was also personally executed by Mr. Baily, 

 and the whole series of stations combined into a general result, 

 which gives for the ellipticity of the earth afTg^rs* ^ot con- 

 tent with this, he has here also collected into one synoptic view 

 the results obtained at various stations all over ihe globe with 

 the invariable pendulum, by observers of all nations, so as to 

 place them in comparison with each other, and to deduce from 

 them a general result. Of these, by far the most numerous 

 and prominent, in every respect, are those of our own coun- 

 trymen, Captains Foster and Sabine; and nothing can be 

 more gratifying, in estimating our own national share in this 

 sublime application of science, than to find these principal au- 

 thorities, whose observations were made and reduced with the 

 most absolute independence of each other, agreeing at all the 

 stations where they admit of comparison, with a precision 

 truly admirable. In fact, the greatest disagreement of each 

 of their final results, from a mean of them both, amounts to a 



