192 
POPULAR SCIENCE RETIEW. 
expedition is sent out by tbe Royal Society, and tbe expenses defrayed by a 
Parliamentary grant. It will be superintended by Lieutenant John Herscbel 
(a son of Sir John Herscbel), wbo is provided with a telescope of five inches 
aperture, -with spectrum apparatus, driving clock, &C. Another telescope is 
fitted for observations of polarised light, while smaller instruments are pro- 
vided for observers stationed at different points. Lieutenant Herscbel will 
confine his attention to observations of the spectrum of the corona, and red 
prominences, and to an examination of the light of these objects, for polari- 
sation. After his arrival in India, until the period of the eclipse, he will 
examine, prismatically, the brightest of the southern nebulae, for which pur- 
pose the instruments taken out are perfectly suitable. 
The Royal Astronomical Society held their annual general meeting on the 
14th of February last, when it was stated that the number of the Fellows 
was then 529, and that the funded property of the society had increased. 
The Gold Medal of the Society has been awarded this year to M. Leverrier, 
for his Solar and Planetary Tables, which include Mercury, Venus, the 
Earth, and Mars, and have superseded all others for calculating the places of 
the bodies referred to. In awarding the medal, the retiring President, the 
Rev. Charles Pritchard, gave a resume of M. Leverrier’s life and labours \ 
he showed the difficulties with which he had to contend at the outset of his 
career, and the successful efforts made by him to overcome them. When he 
entered on his duties at the Paris Observatory, the instrumental equipment 
was very defective ; up to 1800, no transit instrument of any description had 
been employed, and that used up to 1828 was inferior to the Greenwich in- 
strument of seventy years before. M. Leverrier set to work vigorously to 
repair this state of things, fired with the ambition to enter upon equal terms 
on a contest with other nations in the pursuit of his noble science, and with 
a result, the value of which the annals of the observatory now furnish full 
proof. The observatory of each nation taking a distinct line — Pulkowa, that 
of sidereal research j Greenwich, the moon and navigation — Leverrier 
adopted the idea of recomputing the places of the planets, a scheme in- 
volving vast labour. He again reduced the best observations of Bradley, 
and others, at Greenwich, from 1750 to 1850 j he recomputed the observa- 
tions of Bessel \ he extended the formulae for calculating the planetary ap- 
proximations beyond the point at which La Place thought the perturbing 
forces might be disregarded. In fact, he published a complete reinvestigation 
of the whole theory of planetary motion, and then applied himself to the 
construction of those tables which have superseded all others in the compu- 
tations for the Nautical Almanac, Leverrier has made a great advance in 
accuracy upon all previous results, and the average discordance between ob- 
servation and prediction, now remaining, does not exceed a small fraction of 
the diameter of each of the three planets named. Leverrier’s labours in 
ascertaining the solar parallax, on the secular variation of the moon’s mean 
motion, and in other matters having been alluded to, the President delivered 
the gold medal to Admiral Manners, to transmit to the distinguished astro- 
nomer to whom it had been voted, who regretted that he was prevented by 
the state of his health, and the recent death of M. Foucault, from coming 
to receive it in person. 
The November Meteors of 1867. — Since the publication of our summary in 
