The same authority eulogizes him further for his laborious working out of every conceivable cause or indication of error in his declination instruments, for the system which he introduced in the observation of transits, for the thoroughness with which he determined all his fundamental data, and for the regularity which he infused into the Greenwich observations. One result of this great increase of accuracy was that Pond was able at once authoritatively to discard the erroneous stellar parallaxes that had been announced by Brinkley, Royal Astronomer for Ireland. But Pond's administration was open, in several particulars, to serious censure, and the Board of Visitors, which had been for many years but a committee of the Royal Society, but which had recently been reconstituted, proved its value and efficiency by the remonstrances which it addressed to him, and which eventually brought about his resignation. His personal skill and insight as an observer were of the highest order; but either from lack of interest or failing health, he absented himself almost entirely from the Observatory in later years, visiting it only every ninth or tenth day. He had caused the staff of assistants to be increased from one to six, but had stipulated that the men supplied to him should be 'drudges.' His minute on the subject ran-- 'I want indefatigable, hard-working, and, above all, obedient drudges (for so I must call them, although they are drudges of a superior order), men who will be contented to pass half their day in using their hands and eyes in the mechanical act of observing, and the remainder of it in the dull process of calculation.' This was a fatal mistake, and one which it is very hard to understand how any one with a real interest in the science could have made. Men who had the spirit of 'drudges,' to whom observation was a mere 'mechanical act,' and calculation a 'dull process,' were not likely to maintain the honour of the Observatory, particularly under an absentee Astronomer Royal. Pond tried to overcome the difficulty by devising rules for their guidance of iron rigidity. The result was that after his resignation, in 1835, the First Lord and the Secretary of the Admiralty expressed their feeling to Airy, Pond's successor, 'that the Observatory had fallen into such a state of disrepute that the whole establishment should be cleared out.' A further evil was the excessive development of chronometer business, so as practically to swamp the real work of the Observatory, whilst the prices paid for the chronometers at this time were often much larger than would have been the case under a more business-like administration.