found a temporary home in the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, where it put Dr. Maskelyne out of conceit with the instruments he had for national use, and, not long before, for exhibition, with handling by the public, at so much per head![1] Colonel Walsh again makes his appearance as entertaining Herschel at dinner with the Astronomer-Royal, and Mr. Aubert, a well-known observer of those days. Both of them were delighted with the new telescope and its inventor.
Maskelyne was provided at Greenwich with two mural quadrants of eight feet radius at a cost of £280 each, a great transit instrument, a sector of 12 feet, and many other instruments. An assistant also was kept constantly at work on the observations made. Astronomers allowed that at no place had so many good observations been made as at Greenwich, but Maskelyne was dissatisfied when he compared the instruments with the telescope of Herschel, the work of the ablest craftsmen in England with that of a novice.[2] On February 20, 1806, the French mathematicians, "notwithstanding the spirit of hostility that had so long animated England and France against one another," gave a most gratifying proof of the regard in which they held Maskelyne and his predecessors in the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. They wrote by De Lambre to Maskelyne, sending him seven copies of their newly published astronomical tables, and paying the homage of gratitude and esteem to "the author of the greatest and most precious collection of observations that exists." They were "deduced, by the rules of Laplace, chiefly from a series of more than three thousand two hundred observations made at
