Note 34 — William Herschel. (continued 2)

The memoirs on the parallaxes of stars, written by various astronomers from 1750 to 1800, were mainly directed to the improvement of the methods, or to the discovery of the parallax of some particular star. For example, Lacaille's observations of Sirius, at the Cape of Good Hope, had resulted in a parallax of 9″ for that star—a quantity over forty times too large.