G. B. Airy

“ The Illustrated Review, a London biographical and literary periodical, to which we are indebted for the preceding statements, remarks that, since the death of Sir John Herschel, on the 11th of May, 1871, Sir George Airy, the Astronomer Royal, is the admitted master of the sublime science. There are other eminent English astronomers—as John Hinde, the discoverer of many asteroids, and John Adams, also a Cambridge Senior Wrangler and the rival of Urban Leverrier, who groped his way by mathematical calculation to the discovery of the position of the hitherto unknown planet Neptune. ”

“ During the battle of the gauges in the railway world Sir George Airy strenuously advocated the narrow gauge, and he just as energetically advocates the adoption of a decimal currency. The writings of the Astronomer Royal are numerous. He has contributed largely to the Cambridge Transactions and the Philosophical Transactions. ”

“ Perhaps the finest transit-circle at present anywhere to be found is the one he there constructed in 1860, the circles being no less than six feet in diameter, and the telescope affixed between the two graduated disks being twelve feet long, and having an object-glass of as many as eight inches in aperture. ”