numbers were, of course, very small, and meagre in their details.
They were issued by the astronomers of the French Academy of
Sciences, under the combined auspices of the academy and the
government. They included not merely predictions from the tables,
but also astronomical observations made at the Paris Observatory
or elsewhere. When the Bureau of Longitudes was created in 1795,
the preparation of the work was intrusted to it, and has remained
in its charge until the present time. As it is the oldest, so, in
respect at least to number of pages, it is the largest ephemeris
of the present time. The astronomical portion of the volume for
1879 fills more than seven hundred pages, while the table of
geographical positions, which has always been a feature of the
work, contains nearly one hundred pages more.

The first issue of the British Nautical Almanac was that for the
year 1767 and appeared in 1766. It differs from the French Almanac
in owing its origin entirely to the needs of navigation. The
British nation, as the leading maritime power of the world, was
naturally interested in the discovery of a method by which the
longitude could be found at sea. As most of my hearers are
probably aware, there was, for many years, a standing offer by the
British government, of ten thousand pounds for the discovery of a
practical and sufficiently accurate method of attaining this
object. If I am rightly informed, the requirement was that a ship
should be able to determine the Greenwich time within two minutes,
after being six months at sea. When the office of Astronomer Royal
was established in 1765, the duty of the incumbent was declared to
be "to apply himself with the most exact care and diligence to the
rectifying the Tables of the Motions of the Heavens, and the
places of the Fixed Stars in order to find out the so much desired