the Rates of Timekeepers. 403 



Reflects great credit on their ingenuity; and it would be un- 

 just not to allow them this tribute of praise, when, for want 

 of reaching precisely to the point required, they are deprived 

 of those advantages, and remunerations for their trouble, 

 which would in that case so justly become their due. Too 

 frequently indeed does it happen in this country, that the 

 most useful and ingenious mechanics, who have been re- 

 duced to indigence by attending perhaps to contrivances for 

 the general good, rather than to their interest by labouring 

 in the old beaten track, are suffered to pine in want and 

 languish in distress ; whilst pretenders and quacks have risen 

 to affluence, basking in the sunshine of favour, although 

 deluding the public with one hand, and picking their poc- 

 kets with the other. 



Few persons who have read the marquis of Worcester's- 

 Century of Inventions, and know the fate of his machines, 

 have not regretted, that no attention was paid to his peti- 

 tion, for pecuniary assistance to enable him to complete 

 these inventions* and publish them for the general benefit 

 of mankind ; more especially* as we are now convinced from 

 the circumstance of many of them having been reinvented, 

 that they were not the idle fancies of a lively imagination, 

 but that they were realities, which he had actually con- 

 structed and applied to practice. Indeed at present, there is 

 not any one department of the abstruse sciences, which can 

 boast of receiving that encouragement or support, which, 

 from its value to a commercial nation like Great Britain, it 

 has a right to expect. 



It may appear rather extraordinary at this enlightened pe- 

 riod, when so many improvements have been made in in- 

 struments, and so great a degree of accuracy attained in 

 practical astronomy, that the present mode of ascertaining 

 and applying the rate of a timekeeper, practised in our fixed 

 observations* should be called in question : and although I 

 have looked over most of the publications on this subject, 

 yet I am not aware of any arguments by which it can be 

 justified. 



The object intended by obtaining a rate, is to predict how 

 far from truth the chronometer will be at the end of a given 



Cc2 time; 



