Excerpt from The Cape Catalogue of 1159 Stars: Deduced From Observations at the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope, 1856 to 1861, Reduced to the Epoch 1860

The Right Ascensions of those Stars which have been used for clock error can do little more than reproduce the assumed tabular places em ployed in the reductions, and the Right Ascensions of other Stars not further from the Equator than those of the usual clock-star list can never differ much from the results of the Northern Observatories.

The North Polar Distances of the same well-observed Stars can now be of little value. The results are not likely to be compared with those of the Northern Observatories for a discussion of the errors of the refraction tables when results made with more powerful instruments are available.

I have made these remarks, not only in justice to the present staff, and to explain the work upon which they have been employed, but because it was these considerations which led me to pass over the earlier observations, and to commence the systematic reductions with the year 1856, when the Transit Circle was first brought into regular use. I felt that these reductions could not be any longer delayed without the value of the results being greatly diminished. I had, and still have, hopes, that the data collected in the present Catalogue for corresponding observations at the Northern Observatories would be found suflicient to meet the actual requirements of Astronomers, so far as these requirements can be met by the material collected here, and that I might be relieved from the laborious and somewhat useless task of completing the reductions of the earlier Observations of Stars whose positions have been fixed already with an accuracy greater than could be expected to be attained in the observations made with the, comparatively speaking, inferior instruments in use at this Observatory before the introduction of the Transit Circle.

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