214 ‘The Rev. Mr. Whewell’s Remarks on a Note 
was published, into a charge that nothing was done. The 
complaint was, that though much was done, nobody but the 
observer could profit. by it. 
I do not think it a reasonable infliction either on the reader 
or the writer, that a discussion of the character of one man 
should ramify into controversies on the merits of several others; 
and therefore I shall say as little as possible respecting Hal- 
ley and Whiston. Halley, an eminent and vigorous philoso- 
pher, who devoted himself to science in the most liberal and 
useful manner during a long life, I hope to see vindicated, by 
some one acquainted with the history of those times, from the 
aspersions which the childish spleen and gall of an irritated 
rival threw upon him, and which have been so strangely and 
precipitately adopted by men of the present day. I lament 
his or any one’s errors; but when the reviewer reminds us of 
the exclusion of Halley from the Savilian professorship on 
the ground of his want of religion, we may, perhaps, allow 
ourselves to hope that his subsequent election to the office im- 
plies that such unhappy opinions had been discarded. The 
charges of ignorance and immoral conduct are utterly at va- 
riance with all we know of him; and rest on nothing but 
Flamsteed’s extravagant prejudices and passions servilely 
adopted by the reviewer. The friend of Newton, the favoured 
servant of King William, Queen Anne, Queen Caroline, to 
whom the offer was made of being appointed preceptor to the 
Duke of Cumberland, was never by any other person accused 
of want of respectability: and the man whom Lalande termed 
the greatest of English astronomers, and whom the severe- 
judging Delambre calls one of the most eminent men of sci- 
ence that Europe has produced, can suffer little from Flam- 
steed’s disparagement of his knowledge. 
I hold Whiston’s testimony to be of small value (not that 
he himself was a worthless person, as the reviewer takes the 
liberty of misquoting me), from the extraordinary inconsistency, 
prejudice, and self-conceit, which I find in his memoirs of 
himself. That he had some mathematical knowledge is little 
to the purpose ; though, even in such subjects, I suppose the 
reviewer is not prepared to admire the judgement which led 
him to recommend the scheme of finding the longitude by 
having ships moored all over the surface of the ocean, each to 
fire a gun at midnight, so as to be heard and seen at any place. 
The reviewer states that Halley also kept his observations 
of the moon long unpublished, in order to have a chance of 
obtaining the reward for the longitude; and asks, ** What does 
Mr. Whewell think of private property now?” To which I 
answer, that I think of Halley’s property as I think of Flam- 
