144 HISTORY OF THE [1860-70 spoken free lance, or perhaps we should better employ Dr. Lee's own term, " that indefatigable officer," Admiral Smyth, who was always having his tilt at the " magnates and dons " main- taining a private observatory, chosing a promising line of research then in its infancy, leaving it in the hands of a capable and en- thusiastic observer, initiating work that only comes to fulness years later under the fostering help of the Society, aided by its loyal members. Lee delivered Presidential Addresses in presenting the medal to De la Rue in 1862 for his astronomical researches, and especially for his application of photography, and to Argelander in 1863 for his survey of the northern heavens. Of De la Rue's work the Council in their report could " not help remarking that this public recognition of the success of chemical delineation of celestial objects may be an important date in the history of Astronomy. No discovery of our day affords a more hopeful field of anticipation than that of photo- graphy, which seems destined to take that part in the astronomy of visual phenomena which graduated instruments have taken in the Astronomy of motions and positions." The antithesis suggested in this quaintly worded comment seems to have been dictated by the recognition that De la Rue, stirred to emulation by Bond's daguerreotypes of the moon taken at Harvard College Observatory in 1850, applied the newly invented collodion wet plates to the photography not only of the moon, but also of the sun, the prominences and lower corona, and of Jupiter, Saturn, and some double stars, but had not yet fully utilised his records for measurement. Lee, in presenting the medal to him, justly said that " his claim does not rest on the absolute priority of his application of a well-known art in a new direction. It is rather based on the fact that by methods and adaptations peculiarly his own, he has been the first to obtain automatic pictures of the sun and moon, sufficiently delicate in their detail to advance our knowledge regarding the physical character of those bodies, and admitting of measurements astronomically precise." We shall have more to say about De la Rue's organisation of measurement, and his other astronomical work, when we come to deal with his years of Presidency. Of the award to Argelander, the Council's Report (1863) makes a bare announcement. Dr. Lee, in his address on the occasion, began by giving a short retrospective view of astronomical achievements since the foundation of the Society, and refers to the balloon ascents of Glaisher and Coxwell. In this connection a note in the Council's Report for 1862 may be quoted :
