hich I had mapped
out from the beginning. Dr. A. M. W. Downing, superintendent of the
British Nautical Almanac, was struck by the same consideration and
animated by the same motive. He had especially in view to avoid
the duplication of work which arose from the same computations
being made in different countries for the same result, whereby much
unnecessary labor was expended. The field of astronomy is so vast,
and the quantity of work urgently required to be done so far beyond
the power of any one nation, that a combination to avoid all such
waste was extremely desirable. When, in 1895, my preliminary results
were published, he took the initiative in a project for putting the
idea into effect, by proposing an international conference of the
directors of the four leading ephemerides, to agree upon a uniform
system of data for all computations pertaining to the fixed stars.
This conference was held in Paris in May, 1896. After several days
of discussion, it resolved that, beginning with 1901, a certain set
of constants should be used in all the ephemerides, substantially
the same as those I had worked out, but without certain ulterior,
though practically unimportant, modifications which I had applied
for the sake of symmetry. My determination of the positions and
motions of the bright fixed stars, which I had not yet completed,
was adopted in advance for the same purpose, I agreeing to complete
it if possible in time for use in 1901. I also agreed to make a new
determination of the constant of precession, that which I had used in
my previous work not being quite satisfactory. All this by no means
filled the field of exact astronomy, yet what was left outside of it
was of comparatively little importance for the special object in view.

More than a year after the conference I was taken quite by surprise
by a vigorous attack on its work and conclusions on the part of
Professor Lewis Boss, director of the Dudley Observatory, warmly
seconded by Mr. S. C. Chandler of Cambridge, the editor of the
"Astronomical Journal." The main grounds of attack were two
in number. The time was not ripe for concluding upon a system of
permanent astronomical standards. Besides this, the astronomers of
the country should have been consulted before a decision was reached.

Ultimately the attack led to a result which may appear curious to
the future astronomer. He will find the foreign ephemerides using
uniform data worked out in the