450 JOHN H. TEMPLE. 



ble. It is fitting that services which are poorly paid in coin should 

 receive their due share of honor. So thought the members of the 

 Academy when they elected Mr. Temple a Fellow in 1845 ; the first 

 of his class to enjoy a distinction in which only two others have since 

 shared. He was a man to whom this unsought honor was more than 

 money, and he clung to his membership, at some sacrifice which he 

 could ill afford, for thirty-two years. He probably never attended a 

 meeting, certainly not more than one or two ; partly on account of his 

 excessive modesty and self-depreciation, but partly, no doubt, because 

 of an absorbing occupation, too great for his physical strength. 



Nothing characterizes the science of the present day so much as 

 its aspiration for nicety of measurement in time and space ; and noth- 

 ing limits the flights of its ever expanding wings but the unavoidable 

 errors of workmanship in the instruments it employs. The crowning 

 work of Mr. Temple's life was the conception and construction of a 

 dividing-engine, which takes rank of all other instruments because it 

 is the instrument by which instruments themselves are made. He 

 had not seen a dividing-engine when he began the construction of his 

 own in 1852, and it is believed that he never saw any one but that 

 which he lived to complete. All his hours of leisure, all the money 

 which he could spare from his frugal style of living, and many sleep- 

 less nights for twenty years, was the price which he ungrudgingly 

 paid for the object of his ambition. But he finished his work, and 

 in time to use it in the manufacture of his own instruments. The 

 conception and the execution of the dividing-engine were the undivided 

 pi'oduct of his brain and hands. Strong as his own will, but delicate 

 as his own fine organization, it was his pride in life, and is now his 

 monument. One hundred years before Mr. Temple began to build it, 

 Ramsden, in England, had made the first dividing-engine, and Trough- 

 ton, who was to win new victories in mechanical skill, had just opened 

 his eyes to the light of day. But the fame of both, and also of their 

 worthy compeer in France, Gambey, still survives in the- veteran 

 instruments which adorn the observatories of Europe, and divide with 

 the astronomers the triumphs of discovery. 



Competent judges have pronounced the dividing-engine of Mr. 

 Temple at least equal, in solidity and delicacy, to the best in the world. 

 In his own line of work, he had no superior, perhaps not an equal in 

 this country. And he created the standard of excellence which he 

 then tried to attain. With so much of which he might justly boast, 

 he was always oppressed by a sense of his own shortcomings, and he 

 required the encouraging word of friends to make him just to himself. 



