of the ecliptic itself; because the stars, at the end of the period of the moon's nodes, appeared in the same places, with respect to the equator, as they ought to have done, if the earth's axis had retained the same inclination to an invariable plane."(2) FRENCH ASTRONOMERS Meanwhile, astronomers across the channel were by no means idle. In France several successful observers were making many additions to the already long list of observations of the first astronomer of the Royal Observatory of Paris, Dominic Cassini (1625-1712), whose reputation among his contemporaries was much greater than among succeeding generations of astronomers. Perhaps the most deserving of these successors was Nicolas Louis de Lacaille (1713-1762), a theologian who had been educated at the expense of the Duke of Bourbon, and who, soon after completing his clerical studies, came under the patronage of Cassini, whose attention had been called to the young man's interest in the sciences. One of Lacaille's first under-takings was the remeasuring of the French are of the meridian, which had been incorrectly measured by his patron in 1684. This was begun in 1739, and occupied him for two years before successfully completed. As a reward, however, he was admitted to the academy and appointed mathematical professor in Mazarin College. In 1751 he went to the Cape of Good Hope for the purpose of determining the sun's parallax by observations of the parallaxes of Mars and Venus, and incidentally to make observations on the other southern hemisphere stars. The results of this undertaking were most successful, and were given in his Coelum australe stelligerum, etc., published in 1763. In this he shows that in the course of a single year he had observed some ten thousand stars, and computed the places of one thousand nine hundred and forty-two of them, measured a degree of the meridian, and made many observations of the moon--productive industry seldom equalled in a single year in any field. These observations were of great service to the astronomers, as they afforded the opportunity of comparing the stars of the southern hemisphere with those of the northern, which were being observed simultaneously by Lelande at Berlin.