SMYTH, CHARLES

This article appears in Volume V25, Page 282 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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SMYTH, CHARLES PIAllI (1819-1900), British astronomer, was born at Naples on the 3rd of January 1819. He was called Piazzi after his godfather, the Italian astronomer of that name, whose acquaintance his father, Admiral

Smyth

, had made at Palermo when on the Mediterranean station. His father subsequently settled at

Bedford

BEDFORD

and equipped there an

observatory

OBSERVATORY

, at which Piazzi

Smyth

received his first lessons in astronomy, At the age of sixteen he went out as assistant to Sir

Thomas

Maclear at the Cape of Good

Hope

HOPE, ANTHONY
HOPE, THOMAS (c. 1770-1831)

, where he observed Halley's comet and the

great

GREAT

comet of 1843, and took an active part in the verification and extension of La Caille's arc of the meridian. In 1845 he was appointed astronomer royal for

Scotland

and professor of astronomy in the university of Edinburgh. Here he completed the reduction, and continued the

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

, of the observations made by his predecessor,

Thomas

Henderson (see Edinburgh Observations, vols. xi.-xv.). In 1856 he made experimental observations on the

Peak

PEAK, THE

of Teneriffe with a view to testing the astronomical advantages of a mountain station. The Admiralty made him a grant of 500 for the purpose, and a yachtthe " Titania "of 140 tons and a fine 72 in. equatorial telescope were placed at his disposal by friends. The upshot of the expedition was to verify Newton's surmise, that a " most serene and quiet air . . . may perhaps be found on the tops of the highest mountains above the grosser clouds." The scientific results were detailed in a Report addressed to the lords commissioners of the admiralty, 1858, in a communication to the Royal Society (Phil. Trans. cxlviii. 465) and in the Edinburgh Observations, vol. xii. A popular account of the voyage is contained in Teneriffe, an Astronomer's Experiment, 1858. In 18711872 Piazzi Smyth investigated the spectra of the aurora, and zodiacal light. He recommended the use of the " rainband
for weather prediction (Jour. Scottish Meteor. Society, v. 84), and discovered, in conjunction with Professor A. S. Herschel, the harmonic relation between the rays emitted by carbon monoxide. In 1877-1878 he constructed at Lisbon a map of the solar-spectrum (Edin. Phil. Trans. xxix. 285), for which he received the Macdougall-Brisbane prize in 1880. Further spectroscopic researches were carried out by him at Madeira in 188o (Madeira Spectroscopic, 1882), and at Winchester in 1884 (Edin. Phil. Trans. vol. xxxii. pt. ii.). He published besides Three Cities in Russia, (1862), Our Inheritance in the

Great

GREAT

Pyramid (1864), Life and

Work

WORK

at the Great Pyramid (1867), and a volume On the Antiquity of Intellectual Man (1868). In 1888 he resigned his official position and retired to the neighbourhood of Ripon, where he died on the 21st of February 1900.
See Month. Notices Roy. Astr. Society, lxi. '89;

Observatory

OBSERVATORY

, xxiii. 145, 184; R. Copeland in Astr. Nach. No. 3636, and Pop. Astronomy (1900), p. 384; Nature, lxii. 161 (A. S. Herschel); Andre and Rayet, L'Astronomie pratique, ii. 12, (A. M. C.)

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