in the controversy, but he could not escape from the correspondence which the matter involved: and this led up to other points connected with the early history of the Israelites, a subject in which he took much interest. 1885 From May 4th to June 3rd he was at Playford.--From July 2nd to 22nd he was in the Lake District. The journey was by Windermere to Kentmere, where he made enquiries concerning the Airy family, as it had been concluded with much probability from investigations made by his nephew, the Rev. Basil R. Airy, that the family was settled there at a very early date. Some persons of the name of Airy were still living there. He then went on by Coniston and Grasmere to Portinscale, and spent the rest of his time in expeditions amongst the hills and visits to friends.--On July 28th he went to Woodbridge in Suffolk and distributed the prizes to the boys of the Grammar School there.--From Oct. 9th to Nov. 12th he was again at Playford.--Throughout the year he was busily engaged on the Numerical Lunar Theory, and found but little time for miscellaneous reading. Of printed papers by Airy in this year the most important was one on the "Results deduced from the Measures of Terrestrial Magnetic Force in the Horizontal Plane," &c. This was a long Paper, communicated to the Royal Society, and published in the Phil. Trans., and was the last Scientific Paper of any importance (except the Volume of the Numerical Lunar Theory) in the long list of "Papers by G.B. Airy." The preparation of this Paper took much time.--Of miscellaneous matters: In May a Committee of the Royal Society had been appointed to advise the India Office as to the publication of Col. J. Herschel's pendulum observations in India; and Airy was asked to assist the Committee with his advice. He gave very careful and anxious consideration to the subject, and it occupied much time.--In the early part of the year he was asked by Sir William Thomson to assist him with an affidavit in a lawsuit concerning an alleged infringement of one of his Patents for the improvement of the Compass. Airy declined to make an affidavit or to take sides in the dispute, but he wrote a letter from which the following is extracted: "I cannot have the least difficulty in expressing my opinion that you have made a great advance in the application of my method of correcting the compass in iron ships, by your introduction of the use of short needles for the compass-cards. In my original investigations, when the whole subject was in darkness, I could only use existing means for experiment, namely the long-needle compasses then existing. But when I applied mechanical theory to explanation of the results, I felt grievously the deficiency of a theory and the construction which it suggested (necessarily founded on assumption that the proportion of the needle-length to the other elements of measure is small) when the length of the needles was really so great.