41 
hy Christian Huygens. . 
can scarcely be a stronger proof, that whatever might have been 
the attempts of the Florentines, they had till this time very 
little succeeded. Yet Huygens’s book and specimens of his 
clocks had been sent every where, and had been known for more 
than a year ; and at Rome a workman even excited surprise by 
it as an unheard of invention, and gave it out for his own ! 
All this seems to me to confirm in a striking manner the pri- 
ority of our Countrymaifs claim to the perfect adaptation of the 
pendulum to regulate clocks, and to corroborate the suspicion 
I stated before, that the specimens of Florentine clocks, to 
which so much importance is attached, were in reality made af- 
ter the knowledge of his construction had gone abroad ; and it 
must be remembered, that it was in 1657 that he already niade his 
clocks, though the description was published a year later. Even 
the Italian writers, who contend for the fame of the Galileos, 
admit that Huygens first of ail brought their attempts to per- 
fection. (See Brenna Vita., p. 80.; and Tiraboschi, p. 157.) 
Now, it is quite natural, that, as soon as it was understood that 
he had discovered a way of applying the pendulum to clocks, 
even though his method were not precisely knbwn^ many would 
try to make a similar attempt at such a contrivance; at a time 
when a general wish existed among people conversant with the 
subject for an improvement of the pendulum. And this was 
most likely to happen at Florence, where the pendulum had 
been originally proposed as a measure of time, and where inte- 
rest in the subject had been kept alive through the remembrance 
of Galileo, and the attempts of subsequent artists. The sub- 
stitution of the pendulum in existing clocks was not a matter of 
so much difficulty, when once the mode of its action was under- 
stood; and it soon became a general practice to take out the old 
balances, and place pendulums instead of them. 
Nor is this, in i*eference to the Florentines; a conjecture un- 
supported by any kind of presumptive evidence. From what I 
am now going to state; it appears that something of the nature 
described was actually taking place in Florence about the 
time that Huygens published his description. I have nov/ to 
present the class with another fac simile of a drawing found 
among the manuscripts of Huygens, which his friend Bouillau 
sent him a few days after the former, with the superscription. 
