Welsh Journals

REMINISCENCES OF AN AMATEUR ASTRONOMER. By ARTHUR MEE. The notes that follow are written mainly for the encourage- ment of those members of the Cardiff Naturalists' Society who are desirous of taking up some scientific hobby of their own. The number of people who take a practical interest in astronomy is still very small in Wales or anywhere else, and yet the great volume of the heavens is spread open for everyone to read. I shall be more than repaid if only one fellow-member is led to become a practical observer from a perusal of these memoranda. My first astronomical observation was made in 1866, when my mother carried me from my bed to the window to see the great November star-shower of that year. As a child a spy- glass always gave me peculiar delight. I recollect well the great Aurora Borealis at the time of the Franco-German War, and Coggia's Comet that a year or two later embellished the northern heavens. In 1875, I began a weather-diary, which I have kept up ever since, though (like so many other diaries ) with gaps. Some time afterwards, the perusal of Mitchell's Orbs of Heaven," and some other popular books, awoke the slumbering interest in astronomy. Proctor's Half-hours with the Telescope," in 1878, was my first practical book, and at one time, I knew nearly every line of it by heart. In that year I made my first astronomical drawing, a little pen-and-ink sketch of the Moon as seen through a binocular. Some time after I procured a 3-inch (non-achromatic) object- glass, of long focus, with which clumsy instrument I explored (?) the star-depths, till in 1881 a better lens was available, viz., a 2TVinch achromatic object-glass by Lancaster of Birmingham. This was mounted in a square wooden tube, used from a window or garden-post, and when "stopped down," it gave respectable