ABSTRACT
Graduates, 1820-1939 4.1 Introduction The last chapter showed that the endowment debate and the crisis of the university observatories in the 1870s revealed the limitations of the RAS, the government, and the universities as institutions supporting astronomy. Therefore the hindsight view of an Astronomer Royal nearly a century later may appear somewhat surprising when he wrote of astronomy having within the 30 years to 1900 achieved a relatively advanced professional status:
In the beginning of the [twentieth] century astronomy was still the only physical science to be fully organized in a professional manner with a professional career attached to it, and observatories were the only fully fledged scientific institutions. ... but in the twenties and thirties things had begun to change; other careers in mathematics and physics began to present themselves ...1
