PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. i 
hemisphere we owe to Frederick de Hautman, who commanded a fleet 
sent by the Dutch Government in 1595 to the Far East for the purpose 
of exploring Japan. Hautman was wrecked and taken prisoner at 
Sumatra, and whilst there he studied the language of the natives and 
made observations of the positions and magnitudes of the fixed stars of 
the southern hemisphere.! 
Our distinguished countryman Halley visited St. Helena in 1677 for 
the purpose of cataloguing the stars of the southern hemisphere. He 
selected a station now marked Halley’s Mount on the Admiralty chart 
of the island. I have visited the site, and the foundations of the 
observatory still remain. WHalley’s observations were much hindered by 
cloud. On his return to England, Halley in 1679 published his ‘ Catalogus 
Stellarum Australium,’ containing the magnitudes, latitudes, and longi- 
tudes of 341 stars, which, with the exception of seven, all belonged to 
the southern hemisphere. 
But the first permanently valuable astronomical work in the southern 
hemisphere was done in 1751-52 by the Abbé de Lacaille. He selected 
the Cape of Good Hope as the scene of his labours, because it was then 
perhaps the only spot in the world situated in a considerable southern 
latitude which an unprotected astronomer could visit in safety, and where 
the necessary aid of trained artisans to erect his observatory could be 
obtained. Lacaille received a cordial welcome at the hands of the Dutch 
governor Tulbagh : he erected his observatory in Cape Town, made a 
catalogue of nearly 10,000 stars, observed the opposition of Mars, and 
measured a short arc of meridian all in the course of a single year. 
Through his labours the Cape of Gcod Hope became the birthplace of 
astronomy and geodesy in the southern hemisphere. 
Bradley was laying the foundations of exact astronomy in the 
northern hemisphere at the time when Lacaille laboured at the Cape. 
But Bradley had superior instruments to those of Lacaille and much 
longer time at his disposal. Bradley’s work is now the basis on which 
the fair superstructure of modern astronomy of precision rests. His 
labours were continued by his successors at Greenwich and by a long 
series of illustrious men like Piazzi, Groombridge, Bessel, Struve, and 
Argelander. But in the southern hemisphere the history of astronomy 
is a blank for seventy years from the days of Lacaille. 
We owe to the establishment of the Royal Observatory at the Cape 
by an Order in Council of 1820 the first successful step towards the 
foundation of astronomy of high precision in the southern hemisphere. 
Time does not permit me to trace in detail the labours of astronomers 
in the southern hemisphere down to the present day ; and this is the 
less necessary because in a recent Presidential Address to the South 
African Philosophical Society? I have given in great part that history in 
' The resulting catalogue of 304 stars is printed as an appendix to Hautman’s 
Vocabulary of the Malay Language, published at Amsterdam in 1603. 
2 Trans. South African Phil. Soc., vol. xiv. part 2. 
