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THE COPLEY MEDALS.
and education.[1] To discover new principles, and to detect the undiscovered laws by which nature operates, is another and a higher task, and requires intellectual qualifications of a very different order: the labour of the one is like that of the computer of an almanac; the inquiries of the other resemble more the researches of the accomplished analyst, who has invented the formulæ by which those computations are performed.
Such being the distinction between the merits of these inquiries, some difference ought to exist in the nature of any rewards that may be pro-
- ↑ That the use even of the large astronomical instruments in a national observatory, does not require any very profound acquirements, is not an opinion which I should have put forth without authority. The Astronomer-Royal ought to be the best judge.
On the minutes of the Council of the Royal Society, for April 6, 1826, with reference to the Assistants necessary for the two mural circles, we find a letter from Mr. Pond on the subject, from which the following passage is extracted:
"But to carry on such investigations, I want indefatigable, hard-working, and above all, obedient drudges (for so I must call them, although they are drudges of a superior order), men who will be contented to pass half their day in using their hands and eyes in the mechanical act of observing, and the remainder of it in the dull process of calculation."
