lded. On April 18th I went to Cambridge with my wife,
residing at the Bull Inn, and began Lectures on April 21st: they
continued (apparently) to May 27th. My lecture-room was crowded (the
number of names was 110) and the lectures gave great satisfaction. I
offered to the Admiralty to put all the profits in their hands, and
transmitted a cheque to the Accountant General of the Navy: but the
Admiralty declined to receive them.

"On June 4th the Annual Visitation of the Observatory was held, Mr
F. Baily in the Chair. I presented a written Report on the Observatory
(a custom which I had introduced at Cambridge) in which I did not
suppress the expression of my feelings about chronometer business. The
Hydrographer, Captain Beaufort, who was one of the Official Visitors,
was irritated: and by his influence the Report was not printed. I
kept it and succeeding Reports safe for three years, and then the
Board of Visitors agreed to print them; and four Reports were printed
together, and bound with the Greenwich Observations of 1838.

"In the course of this year I completed the volume of Observations
made at Cambridge Observatory in 1835 and on Nov. 10th the printed
copies were distributed. About the end of 1835 the Dome for the
Northumberland Telescope was erected: but apparently the polar frame
was not erected."

The following account of an accident which occurred during the
construction of the dome is extracted from a letter by Airy to his
wife dated 1836 Jan. 31st. "The workmen's account of the dome blowing
off is very curious: it must have been a strange gust. It started
suddenly when the men were all inside and Beaumont was looking up at
it: the cannon balls were thrown in with great violence (one of them
going between the spokes of Ransomes' large casting), and instantly
after the dome had started, the boards of the outside scaffolding
which had been tossed up by the same gust dropped down into the gap
which the dome had left. It is a wonder that none of the men were hurt
and that the iron was not broken. The dome is quite covered and I
think does not look so well as when the hooping was visible."

"Previous to 1836 I had begun to contemplate the attachment of
Magnetic Observations to the Observatory, and had corresponded with
Prof. Christie, Prof. Lloyd, Prof. J. D. Forbes, and Mr Gauss on the
subject. On Jan. 12th 1836 I addressed a formal letter to the
Admiralty, and on Jan. 18th received their answer that they had
r