The uranometria Argentina

IT is now nearly ten years since Dr. Gould arrived in Buenos Ayre~ on his way to ,Cordoba, under appointment by President Sarmle~to to estabhs,h there a national observatory for the ~rgen~me ConfederatIOn.It was more than two years after hIS arrIval before he was able to mount his meridian circle and begin regular observations with it.rphis interval was not allowed to run to waste, and Dr, GOll ld beO'an a series of observations with the purpose of doing for theO southern stars what Argelander had done so wen thirty years before, in the Urano- metria Nova, for the stars of the northern sky.Th results of this undertaking are now published in a quarto volume of 385 pages, and an atlas of 14 large maps of stars.The Uranometria Argentinu.will probably always be the standard of reference for the southern stars visible to the naked eye.Any information about it 'will therefore be acceptable to the readers of the Journal.The quarto volume is printed in parallel columns of Spanish and English.It forms the first volume of the Resultados del Observaton'o Nacional Argentino.It is beautifully printed by Coni at Buenos Ayres, It consists of eight chapters.The first contains the history of the work.In the second, on Standards of Magnitude, Dr. Gould explains the several steps in forming standards for a symmetric and con tin uous series of gradations of brilliancy expressed in tenths of magnitudes, such that the round units themselves should coincide as nearly as possible with those of Argelander in his Ul'anometn'a Nova.A zone of stars 10° in breadth was selected, whose altitude was the same at Bonn and at Cordoba, in which 722 stars were selected as types.This series of standards was, in the end, minutely compared with the corresponding determinations of Argelander, and those of Reis in his Atlas Coelesh's Novus, also with the magnitudes given in the Durchmusterung and in the zones of Lalande and Bessel.Some of the stars had been observed at Albany by Dr. Gould in 1858.A table of these type stars is given with their magnitudes as stated by these several authorities.For stars brighter than the sixth magnitnde, the adopted scale ranges lower by an insignificant amount than that of the Uranometria Nova.Dr. Gould's comparisons of scales of magnitude in this chapter and in the fourth chapter are entirely independent of the like elaborate comparison by ;professor C. S. Peirce in the ninth volume of the Annals of the Harvard Observatory.The third chapter is devoted to the constellations and their