NO. 1.
APPENDIX.
175
than a few days, and perhaps not so long, if the cold he very intense: nevertheless, that it is a useful and valuable Invention, and in conjunction with the observations of the distance of the Moon from the Sun and fixed stars, may be of considerable advantage to navigation.'[1]
- ↑ At every turn men are met with who remind us of the old notion of a town about to be beseiged; when it was consulted how to fortify it; and the mason, the carpenter and the currier advised each as best suited his interest. Perhaps this common place has seldom been better illustrated than by the pertinacity with which the Astronomer Royal gives his own craft the preference. How he could impliedly assume as if he actually did not know, that in the outrun to Jamaica the error of the Watch was little more than a mile; while in his own pamphlet, "The British Mariner's Guide," he does not undertake for the Longitude nearer than sixty miles. How, after such tangible evidence, he could, on the strength of the present surreptitious trial (which is preceded by no certificate that the Watch was properly prepared) come to the conclusion seen here, suggests no better answer than that, instead of being authorized by the Board of Longitude (and of Latitude) to publish his proceedings, that Board if it had not totally swerved from its purposes, might have been justified in reporting him a fit subject for a writ de lunatico enquirendo: for it is, in effect, a new version of Lord Peter's assertion, in Swift's tale—when
subordinate place only, after such unanswerable evidence that they had a right to the first distinction , directly tended to make the authority of the Board (and his own) no more respected among seafaring men than the judgment of a mountebank would be. And this "sacrifice of Timekeepers to Astronomy" would not unsettle the belief of those who value an ounce of experience more than a hundredweight of hypothetical demonstrations.
