83 



appointed Astronomer Royal at the Cape of Good Hope, to which 

 place he immediately proceeded, though provided only with a small 

 transit and an altitude and azimuth instrument, a clock, and a few 

 other absolutely necessary appendages of an observatory. In the 

 course of the two following years he completed a catalogue of 273 

 southern stars, which was published in our Transactions for 1824. 

 The delays which subsequently took place in the building of the 

 observatory, which was not completed before 1828, and the want of 

 those capital instruments which were required to put it into complete 

 operation, although they did not interrupt or check either the in- 

 dustry of his research or the accuracy of his observations, yet by 

 making them necessarily imperfect, deprived them of a very con- 

 siderable part of their value. 



When the mural circle at last arrived, and when he at length ima- 

 gined himself in possession of the means of effecting the great object 

 of his ambition, by making the catalogues of the stars of the southern 

 hemisphere rival, in accuracy and completeness, those of the 

 northern, he found new difficulties meeting him in the derangements 

 occasioned in so large an instrument, by embarking, disembarking, 

 and fixing it, thus producing errors which were nearly irremediable in 

 the absence of the original maker, or of any superior artist. In the 

 midst of these harassing discouragements he was attacked by severe 

 illness, and at the same time deprived of his assistant by a similar 

 cause, yet even under these afflictions he continued true to his duty ; 

 and in a letter to one of his friends a short time before his death, he 

 describes himself as being carried daily in a blanket by his servants 

 from his sick room to the observatory for the purpose of winding 

 up his clocks and chronometers. His disease at last assumed the 

 form of an incurable dropsy, and he died a short time before his in- 

 tended embarkation for England, whither at last he had reluctantly 

 consented to return, when his recovery at the Cape was pronounced 

 to be hopeless. 



In the course of the year 1829 he made, in conjunction with 

 Captain Ronald and Mr. Johnstone, a very complete series of pen- 

 dulum observations, which were published in our Transactions for 

 the year 1830 : and the Lords of the Admiralty are in possession of 

 a very extensive series of astronomical observations made during 

 the last seven years of his life, which it is to be hoped that, before 

 long, they will cause to be given to the public. 



Lieutenant Colonel Macdonald, son of the celebrated Flora Mac- 

 donald, besides many professional and other w r orks, was also the 

 author of two papers in our Transactions for the years 1796 and 

 1798, containing observations upon the diurnal variation and dip of 

 the magnetic needle made at Fort Marlborough in Sumatra, accom- 

 panied likewise by some observations upon their causes. 



Mr. Thomas Greatorex, the well-known musician, was the author 

 of a paper on the measurement of the heights of mountains. He 

 was a person of great modesty and simplicity of character, and pos- 

 sessed a knowledge of some branches of mathematics and of natural 



