“Sir George Biddell Airy, English Astronomer Royal from 1836 till 1881, died on January 2d, after a few months' illness, in the ninety-first year of his age. A sketch of his life and works up to that time, with a portrait, were given in The Popular Science Monthly for May, 1873. He after that made the preparations for the equipment of the British expedition for the observation of the {{w|transit of Venus}} of 1874, a subject on which he had been engaged since 1836. He retired from his office in the Greenwich Observatory in 1881, after forty-five years of service.”