10 Memoirs of the Life and Works 
posed it, fearing that, if the place of astronomer royal weré 
worth any thing, it would no longer be given to am astro- 
nomer. One must admire the disinterested precaution of 
Bradley; but if, in refusing for himself, he had taken this 
opportunity of obtaining a fund for printing the observa- 
tions, the queen would doubiless have granted his requests 
and he would have prevented the disputes which during 
forty years rendered his works nearly useless. Bradley 
missed a favourable opportunity ; Maskelyne created one. 
He procured his observations to be published annually at 
the expense of the Royal Society, and for doing this he 
deserved to be for forty years at the head of astronomy. 
Piazzi, who has alone possessed similar advantages, has 
only published the smallest part of his numerous obser- 
vations; probably, from the unsettled state of affairs in 
Sicily. oa 
Since the establishment of a Board of Longitude in 
France, the observatories of Paris and Greenwich have 
been conducted on nearly the same plan, and furnished 
with similar instruments ; collections of observations are 
annually published, which serve to verify each other; and 
when the clouds which overshadowed one of the observa- 
tories have not equally extended to the other, they supply 
the deficiency. The communication is uninterrupted, and 
the obligations reciprocal: if our tables are in great mea- 
sure founded on the English observations, the English cal- 
culations are partly founded on our tables; but the last of 
these tables have been corrected by an equal number of 
French and English observations. 
Dr. Maskelyne in 1769 observed the transit of Venus at 
Greenwich, although only one phase was visible; but be 
prepared instructions for the astronomers sent by England to 
different places; he collected their ubservations, and from 
them settled the parallax of the sun and his distance from 
the earth. His conclusion was the same as that which 
Du Sejour obtained by the mean of the two observations of 
the two transits of 1761 and 1769. 
He never omitted to make the most difficult and in- 
teresting observations himself, as those of the moon, trust= 
ing to his assistant only when the observations were more 
easy and less important. He followed with the greatest 
attention the methods established by his celebrated prede- 
cessor Bradley, whom he even excelled in the correctness 
of his daily observations ; he improved Flamstead’s method 
of determining at once the right ascensions of the stars, 
and of the sun; he made a catalogue of the stars, not very 
numerous, 
