“In this month of October (principally, I believe) I made some capital Experiments on Quartz, which were treated mathematically in a Paper communicated in the next year to the Cambridge Philosophical Society.  In some of these my wife assisted me, and also drew pictures.—­On Nov. 15th the Grace for paying me L198. 13s. 8d. to make my income up to L500 passed the Senate.—­I made three journeys to London to attend committees, one a committee on the Nautical Almanac, and one a Royal Society Committee about two southern observatories.—­On Dec. 31st I have a letter from Maclear (medical practitioner and astronomer at Biggleswade) about occultations.—­In this December I had a quartz object-glass by Cauchaix mounted by Dollond, and presented it to the Observatory.—­In this December occurred the alarm from agrarian fires.  There was a very large fire at Coton, about a mile from the Observatory.  This created the most extraordinary panic that I ever saw.  I do not think it is possible, without having witnessed it, to conceive the state of men’s minds.  The gownsmen were all armed with bludgeons, and put under a rude discipline for a few days.”

1831

“On Jan. 4th I went with my wife, first to Miss Sheepshanks in London, at 30, Woburn Place, and next to the house of my wife’s old friend, the Rev. John Courtney, at Sanderstead, near Croydon.  I came to London on one day to attend a meeting of the new Board of Visitors of the Greenwich Observatory.  Formerly the Board of Visitors consisted of the Council of the Royal Society with persons invited by them (in which capacity I had often attended).  But a reforming party, of which South, Babbage, Baily and Beaufort were prominent members, had induced the Admiralty to constitute a new Board, of which the Plumian Professor was a member.  Mr Pond, the Astronomer Royal, was in a rather feeble state, and South seemed determined to bear him down:  Sheepshanks and I did our best to support him. (I have various letters from Sheepshanks to this purpose.)—­On Jan. 22nd we returned to Cambridge, and I set an Examination Paper for Smith’s Prizes as usual.—­On Jan. 30th I have a letter from Herschel about improving the arrangement of Pond’s Observations.  I believe that much of this zeal arose from the example of the Cambridge Observations.

“On Feb. 21st my Paper ’On the nature of the light in the two rays of Quartz’ was communicated to the Philosophical Society:  a capital piece of deductive optics.  On Mar. 2nd I went to London, I suppose to attend the Board of Visitors (which met frequently, for the proposed reform of Pond’s Observations, &c.).  As I returned on the outside of the coach there occurred to me a very remarkable deduction from my ideas about the rays of Quartz, which I soon tried with success, and it is printed as an Appendix to the Paper above mentioned.  On Mar. 6th my son George Richard was born.”

Miscellaneous matters in the first half of this year are as follows: