Sir Frank Dyson 85 



instrument was a mural quadrant of fifty inches radius. 

 None of his instruments are now at the Observatory, but 

 the dwelling-house of the Astronomer Royal still bears 

 the name of Flamsteed House. 



In 1684 Lord North gave Flamsteed the living of 

 Burstow, in Surrey, and this added something to his 

 miserably small income, yet even so he was forced to 

 take private pupils in order to make ends meet. He 

 had in all no fewer than one hundred and forty of these. 

 It was bitter hard work for a man of Flamsteed's poor 

 health and weak constitution, and how hard he worked 

 may be gathered from the fact that in the thirteen years 

 ending 1689 he made no fewer than twenty thousand 

 observations, and revised the whole of the star-tables 

 then in use. 



Then his father died, and left him money enough to 

 make life somewhat easier, and he was able to engage an 

 assistant, Abraham Sharp, a brilliant mathematician and 

 a most capable maker of instruments. 



But fresh trouble was brewing. So far Flamsteed had 

 not published his observations. He wished to finish them 

 first and to correct them thoroughly. Sir Isaac Newton, 

 however, began to press him to publish, and in the end 

 there was a sharp quarrel between the two. The Royal 

 Society turned upon Flamsteed, and Flamsteed com- 

 plained with good reason that he was being robbed of 

 the fruit of his labours. 



In 1712 the work at last appeared in print. Four 

 hundred copies were issued, but it was, says its author, 

 full of errors, and he himself managed to get back three 

 hundred copies, which he burned " as a sacrifice to 

 heavenly truth/' 



Flamsteed died in 1719, and was succeeded by Edmund 

 Halley, who was also from a Derbyshire family. Like 

 Flamsteed, Halley had taken to astronomy as a boy, and 

 when he was still quite a young man had travelled to the 



