Royal Astronomical Society. 219 



Proposed by G. B. Airy, Esq., seconded by A. De Morgan, Esq. : 

 — That the cordial thanks of the Society be given to Miss Baily for 

 this vaUiable present. 



Address delivered by the President (Sir J. F. W. Herschel, Bart.) 

 on presenting the Honorary Medal of the Society to William Lassell, 

 Esq., of Liverpool. 



Gentlemen, — The Report of the Council having been read, in 

 whicli the astronomical discoveries of the year, and especially that 

 of the planet Metis, have been clearly and eloquently commemo- 

 rated, it is now my pleasing duty to state to you the grounds on 

 which it has been agreed by us to award the gold medal of the So- 

 ciety for this year to Mr. Lassell. And this duty, pleasing in itself, 

 I execute with the greater satisfaction, because I have a sort of he- 

 reditary fellow-feeling with Mr. Lassell, seeing that he belongs to 

 that class of observers who have created their own instrumental 

 means — who have felt their own wants, and supplied them in their 

 own way. I believe that this greatly enhances the pleasure of 

 observing, especially when accompanied by discovery, and gives a 

 double interest in the observer's eyes, and perhaps, too, in some 

 degree, an increased one in those of the public, to every accession 

 to the stock of our knowledge which his instruments have been the 

 means of revealing : upon the same principle that the fruit which a 

 man grows in his own garden, cultivated with his own hands, is en- 

 joyed with a far higher zest than what he purchases in the market. 

 Nor is this feeling by any means a selfish one. It arises from the 

 natural and healthy excitement of successful exertion, and is part of 

 that happy system of compensation by which Providence sweetens 

 effort, and honours well-directed labour. If this be true of the 

 labour of a m;m's hands in the mere production of material and 

 perishable object^, it is so in a far superior sense, when the faculties 

 of the intellect are called into exercise, and works elaborated with 

 rare skill, and wrought to an extraordinary pitch of perfection, have 

 yet a higher, ulterior, intellectual object, to which their existence is 

 subordinate, as means to an end. 



Mr. Lassell has long been advantageously known to us as an 

 ardent lover of astronomy, and as a diligent and exact observer, in 

 which capacity he has appeared before us, as a reference to our 

 Memoirs and Notices will testify, on numerous other occasions 

 besides those to which I shall more particularly call your attention 

 presently. In the year 1840 he erected an observatory at his 

 residence near Liverpool, bearing the appropriate name of Starfield, 

 which has ever since been the scene of his astronomical labours. 

 Even at its first erection this observatory presented features of 

 novelty and interest. In addition to a good transit, it was furnished, 

 instead of a meridian instrument or an ordinary equatorial achro- 

 matic, with a Newtonian reflecting telescope of nine inches aperture, 

 and rather more than nine feet in focal length, equatorially mounted, 

 the specula of which were of his own construction, and the mode 

 of mounting devised by himself. This was already a considerable 



