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§ 198] observations. Thus while Hevel (chapter, § 153) was the last and most accurate observer of the old school, employing methods not differing essentially from those which had been in use for centuries, Flamsteed belongs to the new school, and his methods differ rather in detail than in principle from those now in vogue for similar work at Greenwich, Paris, or Washington. This adoption of new methods, together with the most scrupulous care in details, rendered Flamsteed's observations considerably more accurate than any made in his time or earlier, the first definite advance afterwards being made by Bradley (§ 218).

Flamsteed compared favourably with many observers by not merely taking and recording observations, but by performing also the tedious process known as reduction (§ 218), whereby the results of the observation are put into a form suitable for use by other astronomers; this process is usually performed in modern observatories by assistants, but in Flamsteed's case had to be done almost exclusively by the astronomer himself. From this and other causes he was extremely slow in publishing observations; we have already alluded (chapter, § 192) to the difficulty which Newton had in extracting lunar observations from him, and after a time a feeling that the object for which the Observatory had been founded was not being fulfilled became pretty general among astronomers. Flamsteed always suffered from bad health as well as from the pecuniary and other difficulties which have been referred to; moreover he was much more anxious that his observations should be kept back till they were as accurate as possible, than that they should be published in a less perfect form and used for the researches which he once called "Mr. Newton's crotchets"; consequently he took remonstrances about the delay in the publication of his observations in bad part. Some painful quarrels occurred between Flamsteed on the one hand and Newton and Halley on the other. The last straw was the unauthorised publication in 1712, under the editorship of Halley, of a volume of Flamsteed's observations, a proceeding to which Flamsteed not unnaturally replied by calling Halley a "malicious thief." Three, years later he succeeded in