Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/125

Rh, namely, that the Government should take the opinion of the President of the Institution of Civil Engineers upon the question, whether a contract could be made for constructing the Difference Engine, and if so, for what sum.

But the very plan proposed by Lord Rosse and refused by Lord Derby, for the construction of the English Difference Engine, was adopted some few years after by another administration for the Swedish Difference Engine. Messrs. Donkin, the eminent Engineers, made an estimate, and a contract was in consequence executed to construct for Government a fac-simile of the Swedish Difference Engine, which is now in use in the department of the Registrar-General, at Somerset House. There were far greater mechanical difficulties in the production of that machine than in the one the drawings of which I had offered to the Government.

From my own experience of the cost of executing such works, I have no doubt, although it was highly creditable to the skill of the able firm who constructed it, but that it must have been commercially unprofitable. Under such circumstances, surely it was harsh on the part of the Government to refuse Messrs. Donkin permission to exhibit it as a specimen of English workmanship at the Exhibition of 1862.

But the machine upon which everybody could calculate, had little chance of fair play from the man on whom nobody could calculate.

If the Chancellor of the Exchequer had read my letter to Lord Derby, he would have found the opinion of the Committee of the Royal Society expressed in these words:—

"They consider the former [the abstract mathematical principle] as not only sufficiently clear in itself, but as already admitted and acted on by the Council in their former proceedings.