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SCIENTIFIC SUMMARY. 
ASTRONOMY. 
RRANGEMENTS for observing the approaching Transit of Venus . — We 
are disappointed to learn that, although the Astronomer Royal has 
assented to the proposal of the Greenwich Board of Visitors that application 
should he made to Government for expeditions to survey the suh-antarctic 
regions, to find additional localities for observing the whole duration of the 
Transit of Venus in 1874, the application has been so made as almost to ensure 
failure. It is proposed simply that the Challenger should he commissioned to 
report onHeard Island (sometimes called Macdonald Island), and that, should 
the report he favourable, an observing party should he left on that island by 
the same ship which carries an observing party to Kerguelen Land. This 
arrangement is altogether inadequate, simply because Macdonald Island is 
in the same region as Kerguelen Land, and will probably present the same 
meteorological conditions. It is a serious misfortune for science that the 
Astronomer Royal, though he has now been forced by the united voice of 
all the leading astronomers of England (headed by the greatest of them all) 
to move from the position in which he had intrenched himself, nevertheless 
moves so slowly and unwillingly as to occasion serious risk of failure. It 
seems worse than a fault, it is a blunder ,• since nothing can render less 
complete his admission of the j ustice of views he formerly opposed, and his 
present perversity (we can use no milder term) enforces his opponents to 
repeat statements which they would willingly leave to be forgotten. 
We perceive that Admiral Richards, Hydrographer to the Admiralty, has 
entered the lists in Sir George Airy’s cause, writing to The Times” in 
terms implying that Mr. Proctor had considered only the geometrical rela- 
tions of the matter, while the Astronomer Royal had taken other circum- 
stances, and especially geographical ones, into account. Mr. Proctor’s 
rejoinder was easy and ready. It was actually Admiral Richards himself 
who most authoritatively indicated, in 1868, the possibility of these very 
expeditions which he now opposes. He and other eminent naval men 
urged in very strong terms that which Sir George Airy had urged, the 
desirability of Antarctic expeditions to view the transit of 1882. Now that 
Mr. Proctor has shown, and it has been universally admitted, that Antarctic 
stations would be useful in 1874 only, and much more useful then than Sir 
G. Airy had mistakenly supposed they would be in 1882, is it not manifest 
that the opposition to Antarctic expeditions for 1874 can have but one inter- 
pretation ? Such expeditions would in point of fact stultify the utterances 
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