Abstract
AT the general monthly meeting of the members of the Royal Institution, held on April 1, it was resolved to establish a professorship of astronomy. Sir James Jeans was nominated, and in the event of his election at the ballot on May 7, will become the first professor of astronomy in the Institution. The last occasion when a new chair was created was the year 1863. This was for Dr. (afterwards Sir Edward) Frankland, who was elected to a separate professorship of chemistry while Faraday was still the Ful-lerian professor of chemistry. Frankland's professor-ship lapsed, however, after Faraday's death. The other ‘elected’ professorship in the Institution at the time, that of natural philosophy, had been established ten years earlier, and was not so short-lived. It was created for Tyndall when he went to the Institution in 1853, and since his retirement in 1887 has continued by election and re-election down to the present day. Sir James Jeans has thus been nominated to the first new professorship to be established in the Royal Institution for some seventy years. It is also the first chair of astronomy in the history of the Institution.
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Professor of Astronomy at the Royal Institution. Nature 135, 536–537 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135536d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135536d0