20 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinhurgh. [dec. 5 , 
And again on Thursday, Feb. 12, 1885, the country was informed 
by the Edinburgh Evening Express, that a reorganisation of the Cor- 
respondence Department of the India Office had just taken place, 
leaving it thus, — 
6 Secretaries at <£1200 per ann. each. 
7 Assistant Secretaries, £800 to £1000 each. 
11 Senior Clerks, commencing with £600, and rise to £800. 
12 Junior Clerks, commence with £200, and rise by £20 per 
ann. to £600. 
.Is not this a contrast of most severe kind to occur under the 
same Government? Especially when one learns further that the 
Colonial Office Clerks have only day work, and, as may be quite 
right, in very comfortable, well-warmed rooms of easily accessible 
buildings kept up at Government expense. While the Edinburgh 
Observatory Assistants have night, as well as day, work in an 
inclement little building perched on a hill-top more exposed to 
storms of wind, rain and snow, and more difficult to get at, or even 
to leave safely, in the dark than any other Astronomical Obser- 
vatory or Government Office in any city of the land. 
Or compare the £100 salary, possibly rising after a time and for 
a time only, to £\f>0 per ann,, with the £1400^67* ann. of a Clerk 
in the Treasury, recently defended in the public papers and insisted 
on as being only just payment for the hard work there, by a Liberal 
Prime Minister. 
E"ow these matters, though apparently in my case tinged with 
personal feelings and sufferings too, yet cannot always, and may not 
much longer, appertain to me ] while they are otherwise and neces- 
sarily so intimately connected with the subject of the Edinburgh 
Equatorial, — if it is ever to be successfully worked and to prove an 
eventual honour to the country — that they cannot but be entered in 
any project for the scientific finishing and physical using of the 
instrument — the largest of its kind that has ever been seen in Scot- 
land. And then it is also to be remembered that these matters were 
stipulated for, and promised to the Astronomer before the instru- 
ment was begun, — see the printed Eeports of the Astronomer ap- 
proved by the Board of Visitors — and that a Board, appointed nearly 
a generation before Sir Eichard Cross, having entered the Home 
Office in London, obtained thereby supreme power over the Eoyal 
