The first meeting mentioned in the minutes of the society, however, was held on 16 January 1865, when De Morgan was elected president, and Messrs. Cozens-Hardy and Henry Mason Bompas secretaries.
[1] Adopting the law as his profession, he was called to the bar (Lincoln's Inn) in 1871; but his tastes lay in the direction of science, and his means enabled him to devote much of his time to astronomy.
In 1888 his friend Richard Anthony Proctor died, leaving his major work, Old and New Astronomy, incomplete, and Ranyard undertook to finish it for the benefit of the author's family.
He also succeeded Proctor as editor of Knowledge, to which he contributed a long series of articles upon the sun and moon, the milky way, the stellar universe, star-clusters, the density of nebulae, &c. These papers give his mature views on many problems.
His most important investigations were those on nebulae, the density of which he concluded to be extremely low, even compared with the Earth's atmosphere, and on star-clusters, which he regarded as showing evidence of the ejection of matter from a centre, and not gradual condensation, as supposed by Pierre-Simon Laplace[8] "Ranyard, Arthur Cowper" .