FLAMSTEED. 



necessary rules for judging of the 

 weather ; and otherwise took every op- 

 portunity of speaking favourably of 

 Flarasteed to them, till at length he 

 brought him a warrant to be the king's 

 astronomer, with a salary of 100/. per 

 annum, to be paid out of the office of 

 ordnance, because Sir Jonas was then 

 surveyor-general of the ordnance. This, 

 however, did not abate our author's pro- 

 pensity for holy orders, and be was ac- 

 cordingly ordained at Ely, by Bishop 

 Gunning. 



On the 10th of August 1675, the foun- 

 dation of the Royal observatory at Green- 

 wich was laid : and, during the building 

 of it, Mr. Flamsteed's temporary obser- 

 vatory was in the queen's house, where 

 he made his observations of the appulses 

 of the moon and planets to the fixed stars, 

 and wrote his " Doctrine of the Sphere," 

 which was afterwards published by Sir 

 Jonas, in his " System of Mathematics." 



About the year 1684, he was presented 

 to the living of Burslow in Surry, which 

 he held as long as he lived. Mr. Flam- 

 steed was equally respected by the great 

 men his contemporaries, and by those who 

 have succeeded since his death. Dr. Wot- 

 ton, in his " Reflections upon Ancient and 

 Modern Learning," styles our author one 

 of the most accurate observers of the pla- 

 nets and stars, and says he calculated ta- 

 bles of the eclipses of the several satel- 

 lites, which proved very useful to the 

 astronomers ; and Mr. Molyneux, in his 

 " Dioptrica Nova," gives him a high cha- 

 racter : and in the admonition to the read- 

 er, prefixed to the work, observes, that 

 the geometrical method of calculating a 

 ray's progress is quite new, and never be- 

 fore published ; and for the first hint of it, 

 says he, I must acknowledge myself 

 obliged to my worthy friend Mr. Flam- 

 steed. 



He wrote several small tracts, and had 

 many papers inserted in the " Philoso- 

 phical Transactions," viz. several in al- 

 most every volume : and from the fourth 

 to the twenty-ninth, too numerous to be 

 mentioned in this place particularly. 



But his great work, and that which con- 

 tained the main operations of his life, was 

 the " Historia Coelestis Britannica." pub- 

 lished in 1725, in three large folio vo- 

 lumes; the first of which contains the ob- 

 servations of Mr. William Gascoigne, the 

 first inventor of the method of measuring 

 angles in a telescope by means of screws, 

 and the first who applied telescopical 



sights to astronomical instruments, taken 

 at Middleton, near Leeds in Yorkshire, 

 between the years 1638 and 1643; ex- 

 tracted from his letters by Mr. Crabtree. 

 with some of Mr. Crabtree's observations 

 about the same time ; and also those of 

 Mr. Flamsteed himself, made at Derby, 

 between the years 1670 and 1675 ; be- 

 sides a multitude of curious observations, 

 and necessary tables, to be used with 

 them, made at the Royal Observatory, be- 

 tween the years 1675 and 1689. The se- 

 cond volume contains his observations, 

 made with a mural arch of near 7 feet ra- 

 dius, and 140 degrees on the limb of the 

 meridional zenith, distances of the fixed 

 stars, sun, moon, and planets, with their 

 transits over the meridian ; also observa- 

 tions of the diameters of the sun and 

 moon, with their eclipses, and those of 

 Jupiter's satellites, and variations of the 

 compass from 1689 to 1719, with tables 

 showing how to render the calculation of 

 the places of the stars and planets easy 

 and expeditious; to which are added, the 

 moon's place at her oppositions, quadra- 

 tures, &c.; also the planets' places,derived 

 from the observations. The third volume 

 contains a catalogue of the right ascen- 

 sions, polar distances, !ongitudes,and mag- 

 nitudes of near 3,000 fixed stars, with the 

 corresponding variations of the same : to 

 this volume is prefixed a large preface^, 

 containing an account of all the astrono- 

 mical observations made before his time 

 with a description of the instruments em- 

 ployed, as- also of his own observations 

 and instruments, with a new Latin ver- 

 sion of Ptolemy's " Catalogue of 102S 

 fixed stars," and Ulegh-beig's " Places" 

 annexed on the Latin page, with the cor- 

 rections ; a small catalogue of the Arabs : 

 Tycho Brahe's of about 780 fixed stars; 

 the Landgrave of Hesse's of 386 ; Helve- 

 tius's of 1534 ; and a catalogue of some 

 of the southern fixed stars, not visible in 

 our hemisphere, calculated from the ob- 

 servations made by Dr. Halley at St. He- 

 lena, adapted to the year 1726. 



This work he prepared in a great mea- 

 sure for the press, with much care and 

 accuracy ; but through a natural weak- 

 ness of constitution, and the decline of 

 age, he died of a strangury before he had 

 finished it, December the*19th, 1719, at 

 73 years of age, leaving the care of finish- 

 ing and publishing his work to his friend 

 Mr. Hodgson. A less perfect edition of 

 the Historia Ccelestia had before been 

 published without his consent, viz, in 



