Thus the matter stood for sixty years after the transit, and for a generation after Father Hell had gone to his rest. About 1830 it was found that the original journal of his voyage, containing the record of his work as first written down at the station, was still preserved at the Vienna Observatory. Littrow, then an astronomer at Vienna, made a critical examination of this record in order to determine whether it had been tampered with. His conclusions were published in a little book giving a transcript of the journal, a facsimile of the most important entries, and a very critical description of the supposed alterations made in them. He reported in substance that the original record had been so tampered with that it was impossible to decide whether the observations as published were genuine or not. The vital figures, those which told the times when Venus entered upon the sun, had been erased, and rewritten with blacker ink. This might well have been done after the party returned to Copenhagen. The case against the observer seemed so well made out that professors of astronomy gave their hearers a lesson in the value of truthfulness, by telling them how Father Hell had destroyed what might have been very good observations by trying to make them appear better than they really were. In 1883 I paid a visit to Vienna for the purpose of examining the great telescope which had just been mounted in the observatory there by Grubb, of Dublin. The weather was so unfavorable that it was necessary to remain two weeks, waiting for an opportunity to see the stars. One evening I visited the theatre to see Edwin Booth, in his celebrated tour over the Continent, play King Lear to the applauding Viennese. But evening amusements cannot be utilized to kill time during the day. Among the works I had projected was that of rediscussing all the observations made on the transits of Venus which had occurred in 1761 and 1769, by the light of modern discovery. As I have already remarked, Hell's observations were among the most important made, if they were only genuine. So, during my almost daily visits to the observatory, I asked permission of the director to study Hell's manuscript, which was deposited in the library of the institution. Permission was freely given, and for some days I pored over the manuscript. It is a very common experience in scientific research that a subject which seems very unpromising when first examined may be found more and more interesting as one looks further into it. Such was the case here. For some time there did not seem any possibility of deciding the question whether the record was genuine. But every time I looked at it some new point came to light. I compared the pages with Littrow's published description and was struck by a seeming want of precision, especially when he spoke of the ink with which the record had been made. Erasers were doubtless unknown in those days--at least our astronomer had none