A Letter to the Board of Visitors of the Greenwich Royal Observatory in Reply to the Calumnies of Mr. Babbage at Their Meeting in June 1853, and in His Book Entitled the Exposition of 1851 (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from A Letter to the Board of Visitors of the Greenwich Royal Observatory in Reply to the Calumnies of Mr. Babbage at Their Meeting in June 1853, and in His Book Entitled the Exposition of 1851 Great Exhibition o 1851, Mr. Babbage published a work, entitled, The Exposition of 1851, or, Views of the Industry, the Science, and the Government of England. The twelfth chapter of this very miscellaneous jumble is headed, Intrigues of Science, and is chiefly devoted to a relation of the persecutions of which Mr. Babbage imagines himself to have been the object, and of which he supposes me to have been the director and manager. A few months later, Sir James South, who is Mr. Babbages intimate ally and tool, published a letter in the Mechanics Magazine, in which he records certain conversations between himself and the late Mr. Troughton, about thirty years ago. I have some grounds for suspecting this publication to have been instigated by Mr. Babbage. I did not hear of. Mr. Babbages attack upon me till some time after its publication, and it was in conversation with Mr. Airy that I first learned its nature. I was too much engaged at the moment to make a reply, and felt in no hurry about it, being assured that no well-informed person could give credence to such a tissue of absurd assertions, and still more absurd deductions. Perhaps I should have passed the matter over altogether, as not worth my attention, if Mr. Babbage had not sought a further occasion for discharging his spleen. Having obtained, as he supposed, a sufficient corpus delicti in Sir Jamess published letter, Mr. Babbage took upon himself the grateful and congenial task of public prosecutor. He sent copies of the Mechanics Magazine to the Councils of the Royal and of the Royal Astronomical Society, as a sort of impeachment, expecting, I suppose, that these bodies would take the matter up, and put me on my defence. The Council of the Astronomical Society, to whom Sir James and I were both well known, and who had also had, not long before, a striking proof that the Mechanics Magazine is not precisely a trustworthy authority, Alighted the affair. I can speak less confidently of the Council of the Royal, but I know that no explanation was asked of me. Baffled in these attempts, Mr. Babbage brought forward the substance of Sir Jamess letter, as a charge against me, at the meeting of the Board of Greenwich Visitors in June 1853, and I then learned, for the first time, what I was accused of. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.