ght this subject before the
Board of Visitors, and with his usual tenacity of purpose he now as
Visitor pressed it upon their notice.--In May he zealously joined with
others in an application to get for Dr Huggins a pension on the Civil
List.--In January he prepared a short Paper illustrated with diagrams
to exhibit the Interference of Solar Light, as used by him in his
Lectures at Cambridge in 1836: but it does not appear to have been
published.--In April he received a copy of a Paper by Mr Rundell,
referring to the complete adoption of his system of compass correction
in iron ships, not only in the merchant service, but also in the
Navy. This was a matter of peculiar gratification to Airy, who had
always maintained that the method of Tables of Errors, which had been
so persistently adhered to by the Admiralty, was a mistake, and that
sooner or later they would find it necessary to adopt his method of
mechanical correction. The passage referred to is as follows: "The
name of Sir George Airy, the father of the mechanical compensation of
the compass in iron vessels, having just been mentioned, it may not be
inappropriate to remind you that the present year is the fiftieth
since Sir George Airy presented to the Royal Society his celebrated
paper on this subject with the account of his experiments on the
'Rainbow' and 'Ironsides.' Fifty years is a long period in one man's
history, and Sir George Airy may well be proud in looking back over
this period to see how complete has been the success of his compass
investigation. His mode of compensation has been adopted by all the
civilized world. Sir William Thomson, one of the latest and perhaps
the most successful of modern compass adjusters, when he exhibited his
apparatus in 1878 before a distinguished meeting in London, remarked
that within the last ten years the application of Sir George Airy's
method had become universal, not only in the merchant service, but in
the navies of this and other countries, and added--The compass and the
binnacles before you are designed to thoroughly carry out in practical
navigation the Astronomer Royal's principles."

1890

From May 17th to 24th he was on an expedition to North Wales, stopping
at Chester, Conway, Carnarvon, Barmouth, and Shrewsbury.--From June
18th to July 24th he was at Playford; and again from Oct. 11th to
Nov. 15th.--In this year his powers greatly failed, and he complained
frequently of