the Rev. John Flamsteed. 137 



cost him upwards of L. 120. The instrument here alluded to 

 is the celebrated mural arc made and divided by Mr Abraham 

 Sharp, with which Flamsteed subsequently made all those ob- 

 servations from which the British Catalogue is deduced. From 

 this moment (September 1689, when the instrument was first 

 used), every thing which Flamsteed did, every observation that 

 he made, assumed a tangible and a permanent form, and was 

 available to some useful purpose ; his preceding observations 

 being only subsidiary, and dependent on results to be afterwards 

 deduced from some fixed instrument of this kind, which he had 

 long sought for. It was at this point only that the observatory 

 could be considered complete ; and from this period we must 

 date the commencement of his valuable and fundamental obser- 

 vations.* In reading the subsequent history of Flamsteed's life, 

 it is necessary to attend to these several divisions of his labours. 



The observatory had now been established upwards of four- 

 teen years ; it remained under Flamsteed's superintendence up- 

 wards of thirty years more (being nearly half a century from 

 his first appointment of Astronomer-Royal) ; nevertheless du- 

 ring this long interval the government had not furnished it with 

 & single instrument, nor had they allowed him the cost of a sin- 

 gle computer to reduce his observations. Even those which 

 were lent to him by the Royal Society were taken away from 

 him as soon as his patron, Sir Jonas Moore, died. 



The whole of the instruments were Flamsteed's own, the go- 

 vernment not having even been at the expense of repairbig 

 them ; and the whole of the observations had been reduced at 

 Flamsteed's own charge (many of them in duplicate), and 

 arrano-ed by him into catalogues and tables. Yet (prohpudor !) 

 in the latter portion of his life, as wq shall presently see, the 



• I do not wish to be considered as hereby intending to depreciate Flam- 

 steed's previous labours with the sextant, and which are prmted in the first 

 volume of his Historia Coelestis ; on the contrary, I consider those observa- 

 tions as equally correct with those made with tbe mural arc, and as available, 

 in many instances, in determining the relative positions of the fixed sUrs; 

 though not so frequently appealed to, en account of the trouble required in 

 computing the results. They had, however, all been reduced by Flam- 

 steed, and many of the results compared with those obtained firom the mur»l 

 arc. 



