520 Royal Astronomical Society. 



solar system, the mean density of the earth. The slight discrepancies 

 which still remain, and which appear to show that something de- 

 pends on the substance employed, and more on unknown circum- 

 stances connected with the torsion-balance itself, are not such as to 

 throw any reasonable doubt on the density obtained being true 

 within less than a hundredth part of the whole. So much can safely 

 be said at the present time ; and it is not improbable that a still 

 smaller limit of error may be substituted for the one just named. 

 Mr. Baily's final report may be soon expected, and in the meantime 

 some detail of the history of the experiment is actually in the hands 

 of the Secretaries, and will shortly be read at an ordinary meeting 

 of the Society. The work itself will form the fourteenth volume of 

 the Memoirs, and a portion of the tables is already in the hands of 

 the printer. 



The Council have the satisfaction of announcing that the thir- 

 teenth volume of the Memoirs will be ready, perhaps, before the 

 completion of the twelfth ; Mr. Baily, having been lately engaged 

 in reprinting, at his own expense, the catalogues of Ptolemy, Ulugh 

 Beigh, Tycho Brahe\ Halley, and Hevelius, in the type and form of 

 our Memoirs, has offered the whole to the Council, to form the 

 volume in question. As might have been expected, these catalogues 

 have undergone such a revision and comparison as will materially 

 increase their utility, and make these integrant portions of the hi- 

 story of astronomy familiar to the observer of our own day, who now 

 looks upon them as difficulties, and refers to them (if, indeed, he 

 have so much as the means of doing so at all) as little as he can 

 help. The outlay saved to the Society by the manner in which this 

 volume comes to us, though deserving and obtaining our warm ac- 

 knowledgements, is the least part of the benefit ; nor could the Council 

 have omitted one word of the preceding testimony, if the manuscript, 

 being, as it is, such as would gladly have been received; had been 

 presented in the usual manner. 



The whole of the volume is printed, excepting the preface, of 

 which a circumstance well known to the Society at large has de- 

 layed the execution. And here, though it may be unusual to refer 

 to the incidents of private life, yet the Council are sure that this 

 meeting would feel disappointed if some opportunity were not given 

 to the members of the Society to congratulate each other, and Mr. 

 Baily, upon his most welcome and providential escape from the 

 consequences of one of those accidents to which the inhabitants of 

 crowded cities are daily exposed : an accident which, as all present 

 remember, almost removed all hope of recovery, and made it seem 

 next to impossible that life, if spared, should have been again oc- 

 cupied in the promotion of knowledge, and least of all in active re- 

 search. Seeing him once more among us, in perfect health of mind 

 and body, and remembering how much more probable it lately ap- 

 peared that we should now be commemorating his innumerable ser- 

 vices to the Society than anticipating their continuance, the Council 

 drop the subject with the expression of their earnest hope that a life 

 preserved against all expectation may be preserved beyond all ex- 



