He kens each jinkin' comet's track, And when it's likely to come back, When they have tails, and when they lack--In heaven the waggish power aye;
When Jupiter's belt buckle hings, And the Pyx mark on Saturn's rings, He sees from near Blairgowrie."
The Observatory, No. 61, p. 146; and No. 68, p. 371.
In an article on the subject in the Dundee Evening Telegraph, Mr. Robertson observes: "If our finite minds were more capable of comprehension, what a glorious view of the grandeur of the Deity would be displayed to us in the contemplation of the centre and source of light and heat to the solar system. The force requisite to pour such continuous floods to the remotest parts of the system must ever baffle the mind of man to grasp. But we are not to sit down in indolence: our duty is to inquire into Nature's works, though we can never exhaust the field. Our minds cannot imagine motion without some Power moving through the medium of some subordinate agency, ever acting on the sun, to send such floods of light and heat to our otherwise cold and dark terrestrial ball; but it is the overwhelming magnitude of such power that we are incapable of comprehending. The agency necessary to throw out the floods of flame seen during the few moments of a total eclipse of the sun, and the power requisite to burst open a cavity in its surface, such as could entirely engulph our earth, will ever set all the thinking capacity of man at nought."The Observatory, Nos. 34, 42, 45, 49, and 58.
We regret to say that Sheriff Barclay died a few months ago, greatly respected by all who knew him.
Sir E. Denison Beckett, in his Rudimentary Treatise on clocks and Watches and Bells, has given an instance or the telescope-driving clock, invented by Mr. Cooke (p. 213).
J. Norman Lockyer, F.R.S.--Stargazing, Past and Present, p.302.
This excellent instrument is now in the possession of my son-in-law, Dr. Hartree, of Leigh, near Tunbridge.
An interesting account of Mr. Alvan Clark is given in Professor Newcomb's 'Popular Astronomy,' p. 137.
A photographic representation of this remarkable telescope is given as the frontispiece to Mr. Lockyer's Stargazing, Past and Present; and a full description of the instrument is given in the text of the same work. This refracting telescope did not long remain the largest. Mr. Alvan Clark was commissioned to erect a larger equatorial for Washington Observatory; the object-glass (the rough disks of which were also furnished by Messrs. Chance of Birmingham) exceeding in aperture that of Mr.
Cooke's by only one inch. This was finished and mounted in November, 1873. Another instrument of similar size and power was manufactured by Mr. Clark for the University of Virginia. But these instruments did not long maintain their supremacy. In 1881, Mr. Howard Grubb, of Dublin, manufactured a still larger instrument for the Austrian Government--the object-glass being of twenty-seven inches aperture. But Mr. Alvan Clark was not to be beaten. In 1882, he supplied the Russian Government with the largest refracting telescope in existence the object-glass being of thirty inches diameter. Even this, however, is to be surpassed by the lens which Mr. Clark has in hand for the Lick Observatory (California), which is to have a clear aperture of three feet in diameter.
Since the above passage was written and in type, I have seen (in September 1884) the reflecting telescope referred to at pp.
357-8. It was mounted on its cast-iron equatorial stand, and at work in the field adjoining the village green at Bainbridge, Yorkshire. The mirror of the telescope is 8 inches in diameter;its focal length, 5 feet; and the tube in which it is mounted, about 6 feet long. The instrument seemed to me to have an excellent defining power.
