provement of arts and sciences, and an instance of such cruelty and injustice as I believe never existed in a learned and civilized nation before.
very common in corporations, or at meetings like this. But here the Cromwell, or Protector, who by sufferance, trod on the necks of these rump Commissioners was only a consequential pretender, conspicuous for his affectation, and of such inordinate self-conceit, that no man could differ in opinion with him whom he was not disposed to think non compos. He was the cause that many of the advantages which might have been derived from the distinguished genius and prolonged life of John Harrison were lost to the world.[subnote 1] After the discovery of the Longitude, the great desideratum was to simplify the construction and reduce the expense of the Timekeepers, which it was obvious he was best qualified to accomplish, if not the only person that could undertake it. Yet the Commissioners, wilfully blinded to this consideration, gave a carte blanche to their colleague, who from enmity engrafted on ignorance compelled the Claimant to waste his valuable time in copying his own work (if he could do that without seeing it, or have the drawings it was made from.) The Board employed Mr. Kendal for the object spoken of; which he undertook very
- ↑ We learn from his pamphlet on Mechanism and Music, that it had been his intention to have presented a clock or regulator of his construction to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich; but the treatment he received from the Commissioners of Longitude frustrated this public benefit, as we may estimate it: their conduct, he says "made him hate to make one wheel turn another." He left such a clock unfinished, which, had he proceeded with, he expected to have brought to the surprising accuracy of not erring more than a second in one hundred days.—In connexion with this subject, it appears, that the correctness he looked to from his Timekeeper for the Longitude was a second in a fortnight, which the one tried at Richmond was something within, the error being 4 ½ seconds in ten weeks. If they were manufactured, as it could not be expected that all should be equally accurate, he would allow four seconds in a fortnight for their deficiency, but not beyond that.
