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The Royal Society of England procured a grant of £800 from King George II. for expeditions to observe the transit of 1761. With this grant the Society sent the Rev. Nevil Maskelyne to the island of St. Helena, and, receiving another grant, it was used to dispatch Messrs. The admiralty also supplied a ship for conveying the observers to their respective destinations.
Nevil Maskelyne, F.R.A.S., and to his clever adaptation of the special apparatus of his own invention to the exigencies of a free balloon. The occasion was the garden party at the Bradford meeting of the British Association, Admiral Sir Edmund Fremantle taking part in the voyage, with Mr. Percival Spencer in charge.
The attack now made upon them is directed solely against their genuineness, and is based altogether upon external, or, we may properly say, physical evidence. The accusers are Mr. Nevil Story Maskelyne, Keeper of the Mineraloglcal Department. Of the alphabetical Mr. Hamilton we know something.
Flying in those days of yore may have been real enough to the multitude, but it was at best delusion. In the good old times it did not need the genius of a Maskelyne to do a "levitation" trick. We can picture the scene at a "flying seance."
Anybody might withdraw, if the prospect, when beheld nearer, seemed undesirable. A mystified but rather merry gathering walked away to remote lodgings, Miss Maskelyne alone patronising a hansom. On the day after the dinner Logan and Merton reviewed the event and its promise, taking Trevor into their counsels. They were not ill satisfied with the potential recruits.
Of course we rub our eyes and ask what on earth, if it be on earth, does this mean? I have not to keep up the diction of my subject the ghost of an idea. If it's conjuring, why don't the mediums say so, and enter the field openly against Messrs. Maskelyne and Cooke and Dr. Lynn?
Why, I thought Maskelyne and Cook had cured everybody of such notions; and now here's this horrid book going to make you more nervous than ever. I shall have you getting up one night and shrieking about burning, immutable eyes looking at you." I laughed merrily as I rose to pick up the discarded volume from the floor.
Dupleix, however, was not driven to despair, but still sought means of renewing the contest. After the capture of Chingleput, Clive returned to Madras, where he married Miss Maskelyne, sister to the Astronomer Royal, and immediately after returned to England.
The ink, too, in which these notes are written illustrates the shifts to which our ancestors were put when writing-materials were not made and bought by the quantity, as they are now, a fact which bears against a not yet well-established point made by Mr. Maskelyne of the British Museum against Mr. Collier's marginalia.
Upon my word," Duncombe added, with a nervous little laugh, "you all seem to be trying to make my house into a Maskelyne and Cooke's home of mystery. Let us go into the dining-room and have a whisky and soda." "Not for me, thanks," Lord Runton declared. "I must go back. The real object of my coming here, Duncombe, was to see if the Mr. Spencer who called at Runton Place to-day was really Mr.
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