Address to the. Royal Astronomical S^ociety. 251 



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 dis- 

 covery, 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 know- 

 ledge which his instruments have been the means of reveal- 

 ing : upon the same principle that the fruit which a man 

 grows in his own garden, cultivated with his own hands, is 

 enjoyed 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-di- 

 rected labour. If this be true of the labour of a man's hands 

 in the mere production of material and perishable objects, it 

 is so in a far superior sense, when the faculties of the intel- 

 lect 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 ob- 

 server, in which capacity he has appeared before us, as a re- 

 ference to our Memoirs and Notices will testify, on nume- 

 rous other occasions besides those to which I shall more par- 

 ticularly call your attention presently. In the year 1840 he 

 erected an observatory at his residence near Liverpool, bear- 

 ing the appropriate name of Starfield, which has ever since 

 been the scene of his astronomical labours. Even at its first 

 erection this observatory features of novelty and interest. In 

 addition to a good transit, it was furnished, instead of a me- 

 ridian instrument or an ordinary equatorial achromatic, with 

 a Newtonian reflecting telescope of nine inches aperture, and 

 rather more than nine feet in focal length, equatorially mount- 

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

 the mode of mounting devised by himself. This was already 

 a considerable step, and forms an epoch in the history of the 

 Astronomical use of the reflecting telescope. Those only who 



