“Faraday sends me a piece of glass for Amici (he had sent me a piece before).—­On Apr. 9th I dispatched the Preface of my 1830 Observations:  this implies that all was printed.—­On Apr. 18th I began my Lectures and finished on May 24th.  There were 49 names.  A very good series of lectures.—­I think it was immediately after this, at the Visitation of the Cambridge Observatory, that F. Baily and Lieut.  Stratford were present, and that Sheepshanks went to Tharfield on the Royston Downs to fire powder signals to be seen at Biggleswade (by Maclear) and at Bedford (by Capt.  Smyth) as well as by us at Cambridge.—­On May 14th I received L100 for my article on the Figure of the Earth from Baldwin the publisher of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.—­I attended the Greenwich Visitation on June 3rd.—­On June 30th the Observatory Syndicate made their report:  satisfactory.

“On July 6th 1831 I started with my wife and infant son for Edensor, and went on alone to Liverpool.  I left for Dublin on the day on which the loss of the ‘Rothsay Castle’ was telegraphed, and had a bad voyage, which made me ill during my whole absence.  After a little stay in Dublin I went to Armagh to visit Dr Robinson, and thence to Coleraine and the Giant’s Causeway, returning by Belfast and Dublin to Edensor.  We returned to Cambridge on Sept. 9th.

“Up to this time the Observatory was furnished with only one large instrument, namely the 10-foot Transit.  On Feb. 24th of this year I had received from Thomas Jones (62, Charing Cross) a sketch of the stone pier for mounting the Equatoreal which he was commissioned to make:  and the pier was prepared in the spring or summer.  On Sept. 20th part of the instrument was sent to the Observatory; other parts followed, and Jones himself came to mount it.  On Sept. 16th I received Simms’s assurance that he was hastening the Mural Circle.—­In this autumn I seriously took up the recalculation of my Long Inequality of Venus and the Earth, and worked through it independently; thus correcting two errors.  On Nov. 10th I went to Slough, to put my Paper in the hands of Mr Herschel for communication to the Royal Society.  The Paper was read on Nov. 24th.—­This was the year of the first Meeting of the British Association at York.  The next year’s meeting was to be at Oxford, and on Oct. 17th I received from the Rev. W. Vernon Harcourt an invitation to supply a Report on Astronomy, which I undertook:  it employed me much of the winter, and the succeeding spring and summer.—­The second edition of my Tracts was ready in October.  It contained, besides what was in the first edition, the Planetary Theory, and the Undulatory Theory of Light.  The Profit was L80.—­On Nov. 14th I presented to the Cambridge Philosophical Society a Paper ‘On a remarkable modification of Newton’s Rings’:  a pretty good Paper.—­In November the Copley Medal was awarded to me by the Royal Society for my advances in Optics.—­Amongst miscellaneous matters I was engaged in correspondence with Col.  Colby and Capt.  Portlock about the Irish Triangulation and its calculation.  Also with the Admiralty on the form of publication of the Greenwich and Cape Observations.”