180 Dr. Gregory's Strictures on Don Hodriguez. 



methods and new fornuilEe" for this express purpose, and 

 pubhsh them so long back as the year 1753, in the Berlin 

 Memoirs ? Did not Dionis du Scjonr nuich improve this 

 branch of analytical theory? Did not Professor Playfair 

 solve the gentral problem in all its useful varieties in the 

 Edinburgh Transactions, before the publication of Delam- 

 bre's investigations ? Did not General Roy, and the subse- 

 quent Enfflish measurers, publish ingenious formulae in the 

 Philosophical 'JVansactions; although Don Rodriguez in- 

 sinuates that their methods are kept back ? And, with re- 

 spect to actual admeasurements, might not the Don have 

 learnt from the Philosophical Transactions (see volumes 

 Ixxv. Ixxvii, Ixxx. &c.) that Government surveys were com- 

 menced in Scotland, so long back as 1745, by Lieut. Gen. 

 Watson; that in 1775 the work was continued; that in 

 1783 an authorized committee or deputation of the ma- 

 thematical philosophers of England and France met at 

 Dover, to conceit the best means of carrying a series of 

 triangles fron^i Greenwich to Paris ; that the work was soon 

 ailer pursued by the appointed person* in both countries; 

 and that from that period it has almost regularly proceeded 

 in England, whatever interruptions it may have expe- 

 rienced in France ? How, then, can a writer insert in the 

 Philosophical Transactions, where evidence to the contrary 

 abounds, a paper from which, all who are unacquainted 

 with the history of this important class of operations 

 would conclude that they originated in the determination 

 of ihe French to " establish a new system of weights and 

 measures }" 



To the same end apparently tends the Don's assertion 

 that " the Swedish Academy of Sciences, encouraged by the 

 success of the operations conducted in France^ sent also 

 three of its members into Lapland to verify their former 

 measurement." For the natural tendency of this state- 

 ment is to produce the belief, that the recent operations of 

 the Swedish philosophers were in humble imitation of the 

 Frent h, and that they were undertaken for the purpose of 

 verifying or of correcting their own former adineasure- 

 rnent; in both which respects the colouring given is widely 

 different from t':ic truth. The Lapland measure in 1730 

 was not conducted by Swedish, but bv i^VewcA academicians ; 

 and the correction of it was proposed long before the 

 French revolution. The followin^^ are the true circum- 

 stances of the case, as I received tiif^m from a learned Swede. 

 Melandtrliielm, the venerable president of the Stockholm 

 Academy, had almost from his youth doubted the accuracy 



of 



