The catalogue cannot be sufficiently complete to give
places of the stars for determining the latitude by the zenith
telescope, because for such a purpose a much greater number of
stars is necessary than can be incorporated in the ephemeris.
From what I have said, it will be seen that the astronomical
tables, in general, do not satisfy the scientific condition of
completely representing observations to the last degree of
accuracy. Few, I think, have an idea how unsystematically work of
this kind has hitherto been performed. Until very lately the
tables we have possessed have been the work of one man here,
another there, and another one somewhere else, each using
different methods and different data. The result of this is that
there is nothing uniform and systematic among them, and that they
have every range of precision. This is no doubt due in part to the
fact that the construction of such tables, founded on the mass of
observation hitherto made, is entirely beyond the power of any one
man. What is wanted is a number of men of different degrees of
capacity, all co-operating on a uniform system, so as to obtain a
uniform result, like the astronomers in a large observatory. The
Greenwich Observatory presents an example of co-operative work of
this class extending over more than a century.
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