on * Newton and Flamsteed” zx the Quarterly Review. 213 
tragical than logical. ‘The Queen’s command. What a 
paltry, pitiful subterfuge! The Queen’s command! How often 
is the name of royalty thus abused!” ‘The evidence that it 
had been abused in this case is, I believe, only Flamsteed’s 
opinion——** This I am persuaded was false” (p. 294)—which 
I hold to be altogether insufficient, even if he had been an 
uninterested and reasonable person. 
The note quotes a passage of my remarks, in which I had 
said that I left it to the reader to decide * whether the re- 
viewer had not shown an extraordinary ignorance of that part 
of scientific history,” &c. As I wrote with the wish of avoid- 
ing anything offensive, I have once or twice since been dis- 
posed to regret that I had not left this decision to the reader, 
without saying that I had done so. I feel much less of this 
regret after reading the reviewer’s acknowledgement respect- 
ing the preface to the first edition of the Observations, that 
‘* he certainly is ignorant of this preface ;” and after his speak- 
ing of it as a want of candour to call it Halley’s, which no 
person at all acquainted with the history of astronomy needs 
to be informed. As to the statement made in this preface, I 
need not inform those who have read my Remarks, that I did 
not put it forward as unquestionable authority, but as the case 
on one side, in opposition to the ex-parte statement made by 
the reviewer on the other. ‘There is, however, this material 
difference ;—that this statement of Halley’s was published to 
the world, and challenged contradiction ; that adopted by the 
reviewer is found in the moody soliloquies and querulous effu- 
sions of a weak man, which did not see the light till a hundred 
and thirty years later. As to Tlamsteed’s charges against 
Halley’s edition, I can hardly suppose that the reviewer will 
carry any unprejudiced reader with him when he adopts them; 
though this proceeding is certainly in the general spirit of his 
treatment of the subject. 
I did not argue the question of right in my Remarks; but 
I must now say that I am very far from assenting to the state- 
ments on this subject which have been published. The ques- 
tion of the kind of constraint which the nation has a right to 
exercise over the publication of the astronomer royal’s Obser- 
vations, I conceive to be avery difficult one: but Halley’s 
statement that the Observatory had existed for thirty years 
and that nothing had been published, is a strong primd facie 
case; for it would be absurd to suppose that the Observer 
was at liberty to lock up his observations for ever. What 
would be the use of such an Observatory? or the meaning of 
its having visitors? I must observe here that the reviewer has, 
very unwarrantably, transformed the statement that nothing 
