Carrington's only sunspot-related Monthly Notices publication from his Churt era was an 1874 priority dispute asserting he first extracted usable sunspot data from Thomas Harriot's 17th-century manuscripts for Rudolf Wolf

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Carrington's only sunspot-related Monthly Notices publication from his Churt era was an 1874 priority dispute asserting he first extracted usable sunspot data from Thomas Harriot's 17th-century manuscripts for Rudolf Wolf

In an 1874 Monthly Notices article responding to a Royal Astronomical Society obituary of Rev. Professor Chevalier, Richard Carrington rebutted a claim that Chevalier originated continuous English solar-spot observation, citing Thomas Harriot (c.1560–1621) instead. Carrington stated he had obtained copies of Harriot's records from Petworth House on 12 Sep 1857, with the owner's (Colonel Wyndham's) permission, and sent the extracted data to Rudolf Wolf. Hayakawa and Teague describe this as "enabling Wolf to establish Harriot as the first telescopic witness of sunspots," citing Wolf (1858, pp. 131–135); their footnote 9 quotes Wolf's 1858 text thanking Carrington directly ("I hereby publicly express my warmest thanks to Mr. Carrington for his great effort in making Harriot's work completely available to me"). On the priority claim itself, the authors state in their summary that "this priority claim is confirmed from literature surveys on historical investigations into Thomas Harriot's manuscripts" — their own survey, while noting that Carrington's priority "is somewhat forgotten today" in the later Harriot literature (e.g., Vokhmyanin et al., 2020). They record the 1874 article as the only sunspot-relevant item among Carrington's six Churt-era Monthly Notices articles, alongside a possible 1875 newspaper article on sunspots reported by the Surrey Advertiser but never located (see claim-hayakawa-teague-2026-found-carringtons-unpublished-1870-sunspot-drawing).

The quoted passages above reach this vault via Hayakawa and Teague's own reproduction of Carrington's 1874 text and their citation of Wolf's 1858 publication, not via an independent direct read of either 1874 or 1858 original. The underlying historical fact — that Carrington, not Chevalier, supplied the Harriot data to Wolf — is not itself flagged as contested anywhere in the source.