Pièce 120 - Letter from George Airy

3 pp.

Royal Observatory Greenwich - As far as GA remembers, WW quoted accurately from him concerning the old eclipses: 'and I was certainly correct: the only point on which change could be suspected (a point of no interest to the chronology) being that in the first paper I had left open the passage of Agathocles to the North or South of Sicily, inclining however to the North, but in the second paper I decide on the South'. There was some quibbling about another eclipse 'computed only from [Buachkardt's] elements, and is so stated in my first paper. It has since been computed with Hansen's elements (nearly as was described for Buackhardt's) far north of the sea of Azores. If this is the matter of which you were thinking I will send a note on it to the Athenaeum'. Were the quarrels at the BAAS meeting of 1857 or 1856?.