Page:Memoirs of a Trait in the Character of George III.djvu/242

NO. 1. observations can be made by this method to ascertain the Longitude at sea. his material substance, and infused more gall into his ink than the maker intended.—It cannot be too much condemned, that while the proofs are inaccessible (unless Mr. Croker has seen them somewhere) Dr. Maskelyne arrogates a superiority for his adopted method without evidence, and presuming, as the vulgar often do, that mere assertion will be satisfactory in his own cause.

Without disparaging this Gentleman's professional eminence, he certainly injured himself by a proceeding that inverts the order of things. And, unless the authority for publishing the trial was the sole act of Lord Morton, whose reasons were no more worth searching for than "two grains of wheat in a bushel of chaff," what can be thought of the Commissioners from Oxford and Cambridge? persons whom politeness supposes qualified to fathom the profund of science, as well as of the Bathos, not one of whom came forward to vindicate his sanction of the superiority assumed by his colleague over horological Mechanics; supported, as it was, by what?—by a total failure of the attestations indispensably necessary to give it any weight.—Several years ago it was becoming .common for the burglars in London, to set fire to some dwellinghouse or comptinghouse, for an opportunity of plundering in the confusion. When detected, their examination before the magistrates led to the remark, that there were wretches, who, for the sake of some booty worth a few guineas, would not scruple to involve a whole neighbourhood in total ruin, including the loss of lives. We shudder with horror at such an account: but it behooves to recollect that philosophers infatuated with a favourite theory, of extreme uncertainty in practice, are in danger of leading us to a similar result. So it was, and the why and wherefore cannot be known till the consummation of all things. Neville Maskelyne, D.D. and Astronomer Royal, uniformly exhorts those concerned in navigating ships to distant climes and