Page:Memoirs of a Trait in the Character of George III.djvu/237

180 Watch to keep time, from the last solar observation with sufficient exactness, which common Watches But unluckily the learned Secretary's illustrations are inversely as his argument, for when he would show from the log-books of the Navy, three of which he cites, the extraordinary accuracy now attained in finding the Longitude, which in one ship (the Bucephalus) was actually without a fraction; instead of adducing his instances from what he calls, and which he repeats is the surest method, they are all drawn from chronometry. So that the honourable Gentleman, by his previous decision, may be said to have discharged a bullet at the Mechanics, so inexperiencedly levelled at their metallic defences, that in its rebound it knocks him down head over heels: and possibly furnished some entertainment, and a few ironical potations to his health, at the houses of call in Clerkenwell.

Mr. Croker being himself, we conclude, no ordinary mathematician, will excuse us, if we bring him forward, like the genius just mentioned, but with more science, calculating his distance from the bodkin secundum artem, and his throw in the true parabola of a curve, instead of stepping up, and passing the pea through it at once, for there could be no difficulty in that. This inartificial method was however, we can inform him, greatly preferred by George 3rd to the countervailing difficulties so often attending the Lunar process. And—exclusive of the singular quotation from the log-books, there is a test by which this merely mechanical practice, as Mr. Croker designates it (according to the reporters) may be pitted against the scientific method, by him regarded as the most certain, and even indirectly deemed suitable for the gentlemen on the quarter deck, while the other expedient might with propriety be consigned to the warrant officers forward. The Author knows more than one mercantile Captain whose confidence in his chronometer induces him to forego the precarious mode of reckoning by the log, which is now regarded as a farce in the Navy, but were it proposed to any sailor worth his salt to rely