Anniversary o/' 1 840. 149 



" To the British Association also, astronomers are indehted for 

 another work of a similar kind : namely, the reduction of all the 

 observations of stars made by Lacaille at the Cape of Good Hope. 

 It is well known that only 1942 of those stars were reduced by La- 

 caille himself, and formed into a catalogue, which is printed at the 

 end of his 'Ca-liim Australc StelUferum :' but the great mass of his 

 observations, consisting of upwards of 10,000, have never yet been 

 reduced, although they are of equal authority with those in the pub- 

 lished catalogue. The execution of this work is proceeding under 

 the direction of Professor Henderson of Edinburgh, who has been 

 kind enough to supply the elements for the reduction, and to super- 

 intend the process of the computations : and there is every reason 

 to believe that Lacaille's new and enlarged catalogue will, as far as 

 the stars in the old catalogue are concerned, be more entitled to 

 confidence (since it is founded on more accurate elements) than the 

 original catalogue published by Lacaille himself. It will, moreover, 

 contain a great number of other stars of equal authority, unknown 

 to astronomers till the appearance of the recent catalogue of Sir 

 Thomas Brisbane. 



" Connected with this subject is another work of great interest, 

 likewise proposed by the British Association ; namely, a revision of 

 the nomenclature of the stars, and of tlieir division into constella- 

 tions. It is well known that much confusion at present exists in 

 the notation that has gradually crept into practice : a notation now 

 without order, system, regularity, or uniformity. Hevelius was the 

 first to break in upon the arrangement of the constellations as pro- 

 pounded by Ptolemy; and Flamsteed (or his editors), although he 

 did not disturb the order or number of the constellations in the ca- 

 talogue of Hevehus, yet introduced some confusion by inserting 

 stars in one constellation that had previously been considered as 

 belonging to another : Bayer's mode of indicating the relative mag- 

 nitudes of the stars in each constellation was in a great measure 

 lost sight of ; and thus the way was led for that mass of confusion 

 which is contained in Bode's large catalogue of 17,240 stars. In 

 the southern hemisphere, we find Halley and Lacaille introducing 

 totally new constellations, frequently overlapping each other, and 

 the stars themselves indicated by such a profusion of letters (many 

 of them precisely similar and several times repeated in the same 

 constellation), that it is often difficult and not always possible to 

 identify them. With the view of applying a remedy to this species 

 of scientific annoyance, the British Association has appointed a 

 Committee, and placed funds at their disposal, for a new arrange- 

 ment and classification of the stars ; preserving as much as possible 

 the old constellations, and Flamsteed's system of numerical order ; 

 but correcting gross errors in such arrangement, and confining 

 the adopted constellations to known and definite limits. The 

 present time appears peculiarly favourable for such an undertaking, 

 when so many catalogues are about to be formed into one uniform 

 system. Those only, who have had much experience in such mat- 

 ters, can fairly estimate the convenience and advantage to be gained 

 l)y such a reform. It is to be hoped that one of the leading mem- 



