since been made. They may be said to form the basis of our present knowledge of the region which they included in their scope.
Herschel's work may be described as principally in the nature of an exploration. He had no instruments for accurately determining the positions of stars. In the latter field the first important contributions after Lacaille were made by Sir Thomas Brisbane, Governor of New South Wales, and Rumker, his assistant, at Paramata. Johnson, of England, about 1830, introduced modern accuracy into the construction of a rather limited catalogue of stars which he observed at St. Helena. About the same time the British Government established the observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, which has maintained its activity to the present time, though, at first, its means were extremely limited. About the middle of the century the Government of New South Wales established, first at Williamstown and then at Melbourne, an observatory which has worked in the same field with marked success.
An American enterprise in the same direction was that of Captain James M. Gilliss, who, in 1849, organized an astronomical expedition to Chili. The principal motive of this enterprise was the determining of the solar parallax by observations upon Venus and Mars near the time of their nearest approach to the earth. As these observations would take but a small part of his time, Gilliss determined to take with him instruments for determining the positions of the stars. He established his observatory at a point near Santiago, where he continued his observations for nearly three years. He was a practical observer, but an untoward circumstance detracted from the value of his work. His observatory was built upon a rocky eminence, a foundation which seemed to afford the best possible guarantee of the stability of his instruments. He made no attempt to reduce his observations till after his return home. Then it was found that the foundation, through the expansion and contraction due to the heat of the sun, was subject to a diurnal change which made it extremely difficult to derive good results from his careful work. It was not until 1896, more than thirty years after his death, that the catalogue of the stars observed by him was at last completed and published.
We do not derogate in any way from the merit of these efforts in saying that they could not lead to results comparable with those of the score of richly equipped northern observatories which the leading nations and universities of Europe had endowed and supported for more than a hundred years. Only within the last thirty years has it been possible to bring our knowledge of the southern heavens up to a satisfactory stage. Now, however, the progress of southern astronomy, if we may use the term, is such that in several points our knowledge of the southern heavens surpasses that of the northern ones. If we measure institutions by the importance of the work they are doing,
