There is no need to give the lives of the succeeding Astronomers Royal so fully as that of Flamsteed. Not that they were inferior men to him; on the contrary, there can be little doubt that we ought to reckon some of them as his superiors, but, in the case of several, their best work was done apart from Greenwich Observatory, and before they came to it. This was particularly the case with EDMUND HALLEY. Born on October 29, 1656, he was ten years the junior of Flamsteed. Like Flamsteed, he came of a Derbyshire family, though he was born at Haggerston, in the parish of St. Leonard's, Shoreditch. He was educated at St. Paul's School, where he made very rapid progress, and already showed the bent of his mind. He learnt to make dials; he made himself so thoroughly acquainted with the heavens that it is said, 'If a star were displaced in the globe he would presently find it out,' and he observed the changes in the direction of the mariner's compass. In 1673 he went to Queen's College, Oxford, where he observed a sunspot in July and August, 1676, and an occultation of Mars. This was not his first astronomical observation, as, in June, 1675, he had observed an eclipse of the moon from his father's house in Winchester Street. [Illustration: EDMUND HALLEY. (_From an old print._)] A much wider scheme of work than such merely casual observations now entered his mind, possibly suggested to him by Flamsteed's appointment to the direction of the new Royal Observatory. This was to make a catalogue of the southern stars. Tycho's places for the northern stars were defective enough, but there was no catalogue at all of stars below the horizon of Tycho's observatory. Here, then, was a field entirely unworked, and young Halley was so eager to enter upon it that he would not wait at Oxford to obtain his degree, but was anxious to start at once for the southern hemisphere. His father, who was wealthy and proud of his gifted son, strongly supported him in his project. The station he selected was St. Helena, an unfortunate choice, as the skies there were almost always more or less clouded, and rain was frequent during his stay. However, he remained there a year and a half, and succeeded in making a catalogue of 341 stars. This catalogue was finally reduced by Sharp, and included in the third volume of Flamsteed's _Historia Coelestis_. In 1678 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and the following year he was chosen to represent that society in a discussion with Hevelius. The question at issue was as to whether more accurate observations of the place of a star could be obtained by the use of sights without optical assistance, or by the use of a telescope. The next year he visited the Paris Observatory, and, later in the same tour, the principal cities of the Continent.