A SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY. by 
of the instrument he had chiefly relied wpon, personal illness, the 
deaths of all the children successively born to him, at last exhausted 
his vital energies, and he died of dropsy supervening upon sunstroke 
and scarlet fever, July 25, 1831, at the age of 42. His grave is inaspot 
of ground consecrated by himself within a stone’s throw of the broken 
pier of his transit instrument; and the syringa trees he planted now 
lean their blossom-laden branches towards the upper windows of the 
dwelling house where he might have hoped to spend many useful and 
happy years. 
But his work at the Cape,was not thrown away. The buildings of 
the new observatory were well planned and solidly executed; its site 
was judiciously chosen on a slightly rising ground 3 miles southeast of 
Cape Town, almost islanded by the converging sinuosities of the Lies- 
beck and the Salt River. A desolate spot enough it must indeed have 
been when Fallows took his first survey of it. Wolves were then still 
common in the neighborhood; the cries of jackals mingled at night 
with the metallic chirping of the Cape frogs; the last Salt River hip- 
popotamus had, not long before, met an untimely death by drowning 
in its marshes; the mole-burrowed hillside was bare of almost every 
form of vegetation save a luxuriant crop of thistles. 
Now the smiling culture everywhere apparent indicates the neigh- 
borhood of a refined English home. Theslopes are in spring all abloom 
with lilies, asters, and gladioli, delicately striped and shaded with pink 
and mauve, or flaunting gaudily in purple and orange; Australian wil- 
lows—the Cape substitute for laburnums—inake golden patches against 
the dark foliage of thick-growing pines planted half a century ago by 
Lady Maclear on the simple plan of inserting a cone into every mole 
hill; clumps of aloes and eucalyptus recall the vicinity of the tropics; 
a grove of oaks and cypresses, due to Prof. Piazzi Smyth’s skill in 
forestry, brings memories of England; white arums, irrepressible and 
all-diffusive, nestle round tree roots, strain upwards to the light through 
the midst of tall shrubs and hedges, fling themselves in lavish profu- 
sion amidst the lush grass, marching processionally (so to speak) or 
halting in dense clusters, and making milky ways of blossom along 
every marsh and meadow. Here indeed are lilies, enough and to spare, 
to strew, ‘‘ with full hands,” the graves of a hundred young Marcelluses. 
In succession to the weaver’s lad from Cockermouth, there was ap- 
pointed to direct the new South African observatory a solicitor’s clerk 
from Dundee. Thomas Henderson began, at the age of 15, to de- 
vote his leisure hours to astronomy. His instinct however was for 
the mathematical part of the science; and he had probably never seen 
a transit instrument, or handled a telescope, until after he came to re- 
side at Edinburgh in 1819. His twofold life prospered. In his legal 
capacity he became secretary to Lord Advocate Jeffrey; his astro- 
nomical calculations brought him to the notice of Dr. Thomas Young, 
Sir John Herschel, Capt. Basil Hall, and other eminent men. In the 
