130 = Nevil Maskelyne, D.D., F.R.S., Astronomer Royal. 
appointment to the influence of his brother-in-law, Lord Clive. 
That biographer lost no opportunity of assailing Clive’s con- 
nections, and certainly, if Lord Clive had anything to do with it, 
it may be said that he conferred a boon upon the country. But in 
fact the name Maskelyne had already earned, for work done in 
the very direction for which the observatory was instituted, 
pointed him out as one almost unique in his claim to the appoint- 
ment, and testimonials are extant in which all the greatest con- 
temporary names in British science petitioned for his appoint- 
ment. He immediately laid before the Board of Longitude the 
plan he had been long maturing for an annual publication, to be 
entitled ‘“ Nautical Almanack and Astronomical Ephemeris,” and he 
undertook the carrying out of the work necessary for the publication, 
which, beginning in 1767, he continued till his death. The vast 
amount of labour required for this important work, undertaken by 
Dr. Maskelyne with the aid of his one assistant and of a few com- 
putors, is in itself a lasting monument to a man, who, with what 
would now be the salary of a junior clerk in a public office, carried 
on for the forty-six years during which he was Astronomer Royal 
the continuous and accurate series of annual volumes, the preparation 
and publication of which now—in certainly a much extended form 
—costs the country over £12,000 per annum.! 
A “chére confrere,’ Lalande, speaks of this work of the then 
deceased Foreign Member, as “le receuil le plus precieux que nous 
avons,” and Delambre, in his celebrated Eloge on Dr. Maskelyne, 
before the Imperial Institute of France, 4th January, 18138, says, 
speaking of his Greenwich observations and catalogue of thirty-six 
principal fixed stars (four folio vols., 1776 to 1811), numbering 
about ninety thousand observations :— 
“He has left the most complete set of observations with which the world was 
ever presented, corrected in the most careful manner, which has served during ~ 
thirty years as the basis of all astronomical investigations. In short it may be said 
1The cost of the Greenwich Observatory and Nautical Almanac Office com- 
bined.— Whitaker, 1897. ; 
2 Printed in full in the Mémoires de la Classe des Sciences Mathematiques et 
Physiques de ]’Institut Imperial de France, Anné 1811, vol. 12, p. lix. 
