JAMES COOK 57 
too often ungracious and ill-natured. He united the 
most passionate enthusiasm for exploration with the 
bitterest contempt for contemporary explorers who were 
doing what he would fain himself be asked to attempt; 
and he expressed his views without reserve in a tor- 
rent of language which can only be described by quota- 
tion. 
Alexander Dalrymple, son of Sir James Dalrymple and 
brother of Lord Hailes, entered the East India Company’s 
service at fifteen and nearly spoilt his career at the outset 
by his bad penmanship. Eventually he overcame all 
difficulties, travelled in the Malay archipelago, and at 
twenty-five commanded a ship in eastern waters. He 
became acquainted with the early Spanish voyages in the 
Pacific and collected a mass of information on the sub- 
ject. He had studied the formation of coral islands and 
wrote a paper on that subject for the Royal Society, 
of which he became a Fellow at an early age, and he 
was well versed in astronomy. 
The Royal Society was desirous of obtaining careful 
observations of the transit of Venus across the disc of 
the sun which it was known would occur in 1769, and be 
visible in the southern hemisphere. Although the planet 
Venus circulates within the orbit of the Earth it is 
extremely seldom that both planets lie in the same plane 
with, the sun when they pass each other, so as to allow 
the inner planet to be seen from any part of the Earth 
as a black spot crossing the sun’s disc. The observa- 
tion of the solar parallax from which the distance of the 
sun from the Earth is calculated can best be made during 
a transit, hence the value to astronomers of this phe- 
nomenon. The Royal Society in 1766 made representa- 
tions to the Treasury and to the Admiralty, and the 
