42 Memoir of the late Francis Baily, Esq., F.R.S., Sfc, 



their practice. Mr. Babbage has subsequently followed in the 

 same line (as he has also advocated extending the estimation 

 of the duration of life to still more advanced ages). However 

 unpleasing it may be to public bodies, especially commercial 

 ones, to see practices of whose injustice they may perhaps have 

 been unaware, convicted of it, and made matter of public ani- 

 madversion, there can be no doubt that criticisms of this kind, 

 when really well grounded and expressed with temperance 

 and moderation, are both salutary to the parties concerned, 

 and merit in a high degree the gratitude of the public. A 

 higher praise is due to the candour and boldness of openly 

 entering the lists on such occasions, and despising the anony- 

 mous shield of which so many avail themselves. 



But while devoting his attention thus assiduously to matters 

 of direct commercial interest, he could yet find time for other 

 objects of a more general nature. Astronomical pursuits had 

 already begun to assume in his eyes that attraction which was 

 destined ultimately to draw him aside entirely from business, 

 and to constitute at once the main occupation and the chief 

 delight of his life. As everything to which he turned his 

 thoughts presented itself to them, if I may use the expression, 

 in the form of a palpable reality, a thing to be turned and ex- 

 amined on all sides — to be reduced to number, weight, and 

 measure — to be contemplated with steadiness and distinctness, 

 till everything shadowy and uncertain had disappeared from 

 it, and it had moulded itself, under his scrutiny, into entire 

 self-consistency, the practical branches of astronomical calcu- 

 lation early became, in his hands, instruments of the readiest 

 and most familiar application, as the touchstones of the truth 

 of its theories and the means of giving to them that substantial 

 reality which his mind seemed to crave as a condition for their 

 distinct conception by it. His first astronomical 'paper, on 

 the celebrated solar eclipse, said to have been predicted by 

 Thales, which was written in November 1810, and read before 

 the Royal Society on the 1 4th of March, 1811, affords a remark- 

 able instance of this. That eclipse had long been a disputed 

 point among chronologists. It was easy to perceive, and ac- 

 cordingly all had perceived, that an eclipse of the sun, so 

 nearly central as to produce great darkness, being a rare phae- 

 nomenon in any part of the globe, and excessively so in any 

 precisely fixed locality, must afford a perfectly certain means 

 of determining the date of a coincident event, if only the geo- 

 graphical locality be well ascertained, and some moderate 

 limits of time within which the event must have happened be 

 assigned, and provided the means were afforded of calculating 

 back the moon's place for any remote epoch. In this case, 



