SOUTH

South was a joint founder of the Astronomical Society of London, and it was under his name, as President of the Society in 1831, that a petition was successfully submitted to obtain a Royal Charter, whereupon it became the Royal Astronomical Society. The observation of Transits of Mercury and Transits of Venus across the sun’s surface has been, historically, crucial to helping scientists understand the details of the orbits of the planetary bodies, and the details of how our solar system works and, by extension, how other solar systems may themselves work. At this point, in November 1848, South seems to be holding a recreational / educational observing party for elite Britons on the occasion of a rare transit of Mercury. He’s writing on 6th November 1848, and the transit was to take place on 9 November 1848. Interestingly, this was not the first time that South had held an observing session for multiple people on the occasion of a Transit of Mercury, as the great physicist Sir David Brewster recounts attending such a session at Sir James South’s observatory for the previous Transit of Mercury (which took place on 8th May 1845), according to The Home Life of Sir David Brewster (1881), p. 106. It’s noteworthy that South’s event was to be a women-inclusive event, as he gives specifics about what the women who are attending should wear so as not to be chilled. Nineteenth-century science was not always tremendously prone to being women-inclusive. There is a lengthy article in Wikipedia on transits of Mercury, including a list of transits and their observers from the seventeenth century to the present, Sir James South is not recorded there as an astronomer known to have observed any of the transits of Mercury that occurred in his lifetime. Also the Oxford DNB article on Sir James South has no mention there of South observing any transit of Mercury or Venus.