Biographical Sketch of the late Astronomer Caldecott. 255 
detected the exact amount of failing in each particular direc- 
tion ; when he has found the reason of it, and has ascertained 
the laws both periodical and secular; and when he has con- 
trived mechanical means to correct those errors which are 
excessive in size and constant in amount ; and invented theo- 
retical methods of correcting the effects of all the others. 
Doubtless, with a new instrument in this country, and em- 
ployed but a few miles from the workshop of its maker, good 
observations and reputable may have been produced, without 
any such searching and probing examinations ; but, never- 
theless, the power to make them is an absolutely necessary 
requisite with a practical astronomer in charge of a foreign 
observatory ; and unless he does make them, and act upon 
them, he may be perfectly sure that however good he may 
fancy his observations to be, or they may actually and abso- 
lutely be, still they will never inspire confidence in the minds 
of others, nor his calculated results any conviction. 
Mr Caldecott did, however, send three communications to 
the Royal Astronomical Society of London, and, from the 
talent he displayed in them, it is so much the more to be re- 
gretted that he did not devote a greater portion of his time 
to such subjects. 
The first was a series of observations made with the fine 
equatorial of the Trevandrum Observatory, on the Great 
Comet of 1843, in right ascension and declination ; to which 
descriptions of the physical appearance night after night, and 
computed elements of the orbit, were appended. 
The second was an account of the total eclipse of 1843, to 
see which, in its totality, he had journeyed to a distant part 
of the country, where he had computed that the total obscu- 
ration, if any (for the case was very doubtful owing to the 
almost exactly equal apparent diameters of the sun and moon), 
would occur. And he made very excellent series of observa- 
tions on the interesting physical circumstances attending the 
astronomical phenomena. 
The third paper was a communication similar in nature to 
the first, but relative to the comet of 1844-5; also a very 
fine one, an unusually fine one in this so-called degenerate age 
of comets, but, like that, invisible to Europe during all the 
brightest part of its apparition. P. 8. 
