i8 HISTORY OF THE [1820-30 struck with their recent increase, we hasten to consider the rise and progress of similar institutions in the provinces. He mentions first the Observatories at Oxford (Radcliffe), Dublin, Armagh, Cambridge, and the private Observatories of Mr. South and Mr. Herschel, commenting adversely and emphatically on the fact that " no public observatory where observations are regularly made exists at present in Scotland." Mention is also made of the Ashmolean Society of Oxford, the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester (1781), the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall (1814), the Liverpool Royal Institution (1814), the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1819), the Bristol Institu- tion (1820), the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, and " many other institutions in our provinces, such as those of Newcastle, Bath, Leeds, and Exeter." OUR FOUNDERS It seems further desirable to give here a few words about some of the men who founded the Society. About a few of them infor- mation is already available in plenty, as, for instance, in the case of Sir William Herschel, the first nominal President of the Society, and there is no need to say more here ; but the case is somewhat different with the second President the first who actually filled the Chair, H. T. Colebrooke. His name may be quite unfamiliar to most astronomers, and yet he was a very remarkable man. He died in 1837 after some years of suffering both bodily and mental, and our Monthly Notices of the time (4, 108) give little beyond a reference to a short Memoir in the Annual Report of the Royal Society. But the essay by Max Muller, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review for October 1872, and was reprinted in Chips from a German Workshop, and in the Biographical Essays (Long- mans, 1884), enables us to form some estimate of the intellectual stature of Colebrooke. Max Miiller calls him the " Founder and father of true Sanskrit scholarship in Europe," and remarks with some bitterness that if he had lived in Germany his name would have been written in letters of gold on the walls of academies ; but that in England, though we may hear the popular name of Sir William Jones, we hear not one word of the infinitely more impor- tant achievements of Colebrooke. To show that this is not a careless comparison, he returns to it at the end of his essay, and deliberately declares that, " as Sanskrit scholars, Sir William Jones and Colebrooke cannot be compared. Sir William had explored a few fields only, Colebrooke had surveyed almost the whole domain of Sanskrit literature."
