Page:Memoirs of a Trait in the Character of George III.djvu/63

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competent pens, finds that though the inventor of the Timekeeper compromised his provision for the different effects of heat and cold as much us he could; yet as the 12th of Queen Anne had prescribed a voyage to the tropics for the final adjudication of the reward, it followed, that if necessitated to give the compensation part of his machine a bias to counteract one climate more than another, his attention must have been directed to the equinoctial line, rather than to the arctic circle.[1] Hence his Majesty's reasoning as probably the reader will, and finding that the ex-president, then deceased, but who seemed to have left the Prophet's mangle to the party at the Board jealous of the mechanics, had insisted on William Harrison and a Timekeeper being sent to Hudson's Bay, testified his indignation at so gross a departure from the original implied compact with any person who should undertake the discovery of the Longitude. "These people have been cruelly treated;" he was heard to say, as if interlocuting with himself; he then turned towards the applicant, addressing him by his surname, with this remarkable and laconic intimation—"By God, Harrison, I will see you righted:"—an expression the author would have felt reluctant

  1. A circumstance unknown in the time of John Harrison, but which recent observations in the Polar Seas has brought to notice, and which might have had a material effect in a trial to that quarter, is that extreme cold has a considerable tendency to accelerate the motion of the chronometers taken out.