"On Jan. 4th I went with my wife, first to Miss Sheepshanks in London, at 30, Woburn Place, and next to the house of my wife's old friend, the Rev. John Courtney, at Sanderstead, near Croydon. I came to London on one day to attend a meeting of the new Board of Visitors of the Greenwich Observatory. Formerly the Board of Visitors consisted of the Council of the Royal Society with persons invited by them (in which capacity I had often attended). But a reforming party, of which South, Babbage, Baily and Beaufort were prominent members, had induced the Admiralty to constitute a new Board, of which the Plumian Professor was a member. Mr Pond, the Astronomer Royal, was in a rather feeble state, and South seemed determined to bear him down: Sheepshanks and I did our best to support him. (I have various letters from Sheepshanks to this purpose.)--On Jan. 22nd we returned to Cambridge, and I set an Examination Paper for Smith's Prizes as usual.--On Jan. 30th I have a letter from Herschel about improving the arrangement of Pond's Observations. I believe that much of this zeal arose from the example of the Cambridge Observations. "On Feb. 21st my Paper 'On the nature of the light in the two rays of Quartz' was communicated to the Philosophical Society: a capital piece of deductive optics. On Mar. 2nd I went to London, I suppose to attend the Board of Visitors (which met frequently, for the proposed reform of Pond's Observations, &c.). As I returned on the outside of the coach there occurred to me a very remarkable deduction from my ideas about the rays of Quartz, which I soon tried with success, and it is printed as an Appendix to the Paper above mentioned. On Mar. 6th my son George Richard was born." Miscellaneous matters in the first half of this year are as follows: "Faraday sends me a piece of glass for Amici (he had sent me a piece before).--On Apr. 9th I dispatched the Preface of my 1830 Observations: this implies that all was printed.--On Apr. 18th I began my Lectures and finished on May 24th. There were 49 names. A very good series of lectures.--I think it was immediately after this, at the Visitation of the Cambridge Observatory, that F. Baily and Lieut. Stratford were present, and that Sheepshanks went to Tharfield on the Royston Downs to fire powder signals to be seen at Biggleswade (by Maclear) and at Bedford (by Capt. Smyth) as well as by us at Cambridge.--On May 14th I received _£100_ for my article on the Figure of the Earth from Baldwin the publisher of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.--I attended the Greenwich Visitation on June 3rd.--On June 30th the Observatory Syndicate made their report: satisfactory.