3S0 
Dr Yule on the use Larch Baric ^ t^c. 
drying tends much to regulate this property in leather of every 
kind. The best oak-tanned leather readily absorbs water when 
newly finished. 
(4.) But; after all, the durability of leather' is the great test of 
the utility of each substance used in this process ; and, so far 
as respects this main object, the two sorts of leather, used as 
soles to each of a pair of shoes, were found to wear equally 
well. Were we to estimate a priori the relative value of 
the bark of Oak, Larch, and Leicester Willow, from the 
proportion of tannin afforded in the experiments of Sir H. 
Davy, the willow bark would excel that of the two others ; but 
it seems probable that the inferiority of the Larch bark, in his 
experiments, arose from the trees being cut down in autumn ; — 
a period when the sap, and its constituents of tannin and ex- 
tractive, are greatly exhausted, from the previous formation of 
the young wood, in which they are easily detected ; indeed, the 
proportion of extractive and tannin, in the succulent and 
newly condensed wood, is in some cases nearly treble the 
quantity existing in the old external layers of bark, especially 
in autumn ; and from this it is probable that the annual prun- 
ings of trees, abounding with these constituents, might, with 
profit, be applied to the purposes of the tanner. 
Art. XIV. — Catalogue of the Right Ascension of Thirty-six 
principal Fixed Stains, deduced from Observations made in 
the Observatory at Konigsberg from 1814 to 1818. By 
William Bessel. 
A HE following important Catalogue of Stars \vas communi- 
cated by its eminent author to Baron de Zach, who has inserted 
it in his Correspondence Astronomique^ from which it has been 
copied, and transmitted to us by one of the Baron’s correspon- 
dents. M. Bessel has mentioned as a very remarkable circum- 
stance, that the difference between the catalogues of Piazzi and 
Bradley, which he had found to be == -f S''.489, ^ disappears 
* See Bessel’s Fundament, Jatron, p. 296, -where he gives an account of this 
difference. 
