130 Nevil Maskelyne, &.D., F.R.S., Astronomer Royal. 



appointment to the influence of his brother-in-law, Lord Olive. 

 That biographer lost no opportunity of assailing Olive's con- 

 nections, and certainly, if Lord Olive had anything to do with it, 

 it may be said that he conferred a boon upon the country. But in 

 fact the name Maskelyne had already earned, for work done in 

 the very direction for which the observatory was instituted, 

 pointed him out as one almost unique in his claim to the appoint- 

 ment, and testimonials are extant in which all the greatest con- 

 temporary names in British science petitioned for his appoint- 

 ment. He immediately laid before the Board of Longitude the 

 plan he had been long maturing for an annual publication, to be 

 entitled " Nautical Almanack and Astronomical Ephemeris" and he 

 undertook the carrying out of the work necessary for the publication, 

 which, beginning in 1767, he continued till his death. The vast 

 amount of labour required for this important work, undertaken by 

 Dr. Maskelyne with the aid of his one assistant and of a few com- 

 putors, is in itself a lasting monument to a man, who, with what 

 would now be the salary of a junior clerk in a public office, carried 

 on for the forty-six years during which he was Astronomer Royal 

 the continuous and accurate series of annual volumes, the preparation 

 and publication of which now — in certainly a much extended form 

 — costs the country over £12,000 per annum. 1 



A " chere confrere" Lalande, speaks of this work of the then 

 deceased Foreign Member, as " le receuil le plus precieux que nous 

 avons," and Delambre, in his celebrated Eloge on Dr. Maskelyne, 

 before the Imperial Institute of France, 4th January, 1813, 2 says, 

 speaking of his Greenwich observations and catalogue of thirty-six 

 principal fixed stars (four folio vols., 1776 to 1811), numbering 

 about ninety thousand observations : — 



" He has left the most complete set of observations with which the world was 

 ever presented, corrected in the most careful manner, which has served during 

 thirty years as the basis of all astronomical investigations. In short it may be said 



1 The cost of the Greenwich Observatory and Kautical Almanac Office com- 

 bined.-- ITOfofcer, 1897. 



2 Printed in full in the Memoires de la Classe des Sciences Mathematiques et 

 Physiques de l'lnstitut Imperial de Prance, Anne 1811, vol. 12, p. lix. 



