x months of 1849, with memoranda of the
exact weeks during which the chronometers were exposed to the open air
at a north window; the weeks the Chronometer-room was heated by a stove,
the chronometers being dispersed on the surrounding shelves; and the
weeks during which they were placed in the tray above the stove. The
rate given during the first week of trial is in every case omitted; like
newly entered schoolboys their early vagaries are not taken into
account; but after that, every merit and every fault is watched with
jealous care, and, when the day of judgment comes, the order of the
arrangement of the chronometers in the list is determined solely by
consideration of their irregularities of rate as expressed in the
columns, "Difference between greatest and least," and, "Greatest
difference between one week and the next."

The Royal Observatory, according to a superstition not wholly extinct,
is the head-quarters, not only of Astronomy, but of Astrology. The
structure is awfully regarded, by a small section of the community which
ignorance has still left among us, as a manufactory of horoscopes, and a
repository for magic mirrors and divining-rods. Not long ago a
well-dressed woman called at the Observatory gate to request a hint as
to the means of recovering a lost sum of money; and recently, somebody
at Brighton dispatched the liberal sum of five shillings in a
post-office order to the same place, with a request to have his nativity
cast in return! Another, only last year, wrote as follows: "I have been
informed that there are persons at the Observatory who will, by my
inclosing a remittance and the hour of my birth, give me to understand
_who is to be my wife_? An early answer, stating all particulars, will
oblige," &c.

This sketch descriptive of its real duties and uses are not necessary to
relieve the Greenwich Observatory from the charge of being an abode of
sorcerers and astrologers. A few only of the most ignorant can yet
entertain such notions of its character; but they are not wholly
unfounded. Magicians, whose symbols are the Arabic numerals, and whose
_arcana_ are mathematical computations, daily foretell events in that
building with unerring certainty. They pre-discover the future of the
stars down to their minutest evolution and eccentricity. From data
furnished from the Royal Observatory, is compiled an extraordinary
prophetic Almanack from which all other almanacks are copied. It
foretells to a s