Royal Astronomical Society. 567 
you applaud one of the founders of your Society, a munificent sup- 
porter of geological works requiring assistance, one of your earliest 
contributors, and one, I will add, of the best Secretaries you ever 
had—whether as respected the performance of his own duties or the 
singleness of mind and integrity of purpose with which, abjuring all 
personal considerations, he improved the Memoirs of various writers 
which found their way into your Transactions. His fitting reward, 
therefore, is this Chair, which I resign to him in the full persuasion 
that he will view it, as I have done, inthe light of the highest honour 
to which a geologist can aspire ; and that as one of our old and sin- 
cere friends, he will ever be imbued with the strongest motives for 
preserving the harmony and prosperity of the Geological Society. 
ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY. 
March 10, 1843.—The following communications were read :— 
1. Occultations observed at Port Royal Dockyard, Jamaica. By 
Capt. Alexander Milne, H.M.S. Crocodile. Communicated by the 
Rev. Geo. Fisher. 
2. Observations of the Beginning and End of the Solar Eclipse 
on the 8th of July, 1842. In the Fort of the left bank of the Shang- 
haie River, near to the Town of Woosung, on the Coast of China, 
By Capt. Sir Everard Home, Bart., F.R.S., H.M. Ship North Star. 
Communicated by the Rev. Geo. Fisher. 
The observations contained in these two communications are stated 
‘in the Monthly Notices of the Society, No. 29 of vol. v. 
3. Translation of a Letter from M. Hansen to R. W. Rothman, 
Esq., accompanying a copy of a printed paper on the Perturbations 
of the Heavenly Bodies moving in very Eccentric and very Inclined 
Orbits. 
*« Sir,—I have the honour to send you herewith the abstract of 
a memoir in which I have developed a method for calculating the 
perturbations of those celestial bodies which move in very eccentri¢ 
and very inclined orbits. I beg you to forward this abstract to the 
Royal Astronomical Society. In this memoir I have treated only 
the case in which r is less than 7’, and I have simply adverted to 
the case in which r is greater than r! That I may be better un- 
derstood, I add here that, in this case, it is the true anomaly of the 
perturbed body which must be employed. The integration is per- 
formed in this case in an analogous manner; but we cannot make 
the factors of integration depend on continued fractions : those factors 
depend in this case on a linear differential equation of the first order. 
** Gotha, March 1, 1843.” «© P, A. Hansen.” 
4. On the Application of the Method of Least Squares to the 
Determination of the most probable Errors of Observation in a por- 
tion of the Ordnance Survey of England. By Thomas Galloway, 
Esq., A.M., F.R.S., one of the Secretaries of the Society. 
The object of this communication is to give the results of an ap- 
plication to a part of the Ordnance Survey, of a general method of 
correcting the observed horizontal angles, whereby the positions of 
the stations are determined in such a manner as to give the nearest, 
or most probably accurate, representation of the whole of the ob- 
