392 
Such is the testimony of Professor Airy, the Astronomer-Royal 
of England, in 1864, although he had, in four editions of his 
interesting Six Lectures on Astronomy , and always previously, 
publicly taught that solar motion in space, as deduced from 
the apparent proper motions of the fixed stars, was believed 
in cc by every astronomer who has examined the question care- 
fully I venture to think that, after this, I was entitled to 
claim, as I did in 1 865, that my Newcastle Paper had “ already 
had its triumph/-’ f and that it had, in fact, forced Professor 
Airy to give up the notion of solar motion in space. When 
my attention was called by a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical 
Society to the foregoing passage in the Report of its Council, 
I endeavoured to make this important change of conviction on 
the part of the Astronomer-Royal known to the general public 
through The Times and some other of the leading daily news- 
papers ; but in vain ! And the editors have, perhaps, this 
excuse for their deciding to keep the public in ignorance of it, 
that a matter so very important ought, no doubt, to have 
been made publicly and generally known by the Astronomer- 
Royal himself, or by the Royal Astronomical Society, to whom 
it was first officially communicated, and by whom it was 
merely made known to the few persons who happen to be 
Fellows of the Society, or who may see their Monthly Notices 
and Transactions . In a letter, however, addressed to Professor 
Airy himself in June, 1864, relating chiefly to some other 
astronomical questions, I claimed to have preceded him in 
coming to his present “ logical” deduction on this point; 
and in replying, very courteously, to other portions of my 
letter, he did not gainsay that part of it. J 
24. I shall now only notice briefly two considerations, over- 
looked by the astronomers, that rendered the notion of solar 
motion in space as accounting for or deduced from the proper 
motion of some of the fixed stars, ab initio illogical and absurd. 
In the first place, upon the prior hypothesis that the fixed 
stars do not occupy the same plane or surface, but are situated 
at enormously varying distances behind one another in the 
depths of space, it ought to have been evident, that if there 
was solar motion onwards in space, then all the stars, and not 
only some of them, would necessarily vary in their relative 
positions, and especially all those of different magnitudes at 
right-angles to the direction of such solar motion; just as 
# Airy’s Lects. on Ast., 4th ed., p. 173. 
t Current Phys. Astron. critically examined and confuted , in three hooks. 
Introduction and Notes. (Hardwicke.) 
X Vide Note C. 
