A new and easy method to find the longitude at land or sea. London, 1710, 4to.
This tract is a little earlier than the great epoch of such publications (1714), and professes to find the longitude by the observed altitudes of the moon and two stars.[274] {133}
A new method for discovering the longitude both at sea and land, humbly proposed to the consideration of the public.[275] By Wm. Whiston[276] and Humphry Ditton.[277] London, 1714, 8vo.
This is the celebrated tract, written by the two Arian heretics. Swift, whose orthodoxy was as undoubted as his meekness, wrote upon it the epigram--if, indeed, that be epigram of which the point is pious wish--which has been so often recited for the purity of its style, a purity which transcends modern printing. Perhaps some readers may think that Swift cared little for Whiston and Ditton, except as a chance hearing of their plan pointed them out as good marks. But it was not so: the clique had their eye on the guilty pair before the publication of the tract. The preface is dated July 7; and ten days afterwards Arbuthnot[278] writes as follows to Swift:
"Whiston has at last published his project of the longitude; the most ridiculous thing that ever was thought on. But a pox on him! he has spoiled one of my papers of Scriblerus, which was a proposition for the longitude not very unlike his, to this purpose; that since there was no pole for east and west, that all the princes of Europe should join and build two prodigious poles, upon high mountains, {134} with a vast lighthouse to serve for a polestar. I was thinking of a calculation of the time, charges, and dimensions. Now you must understand his project is by lighthouses, and explosion of bombs at a certain hour."
The plan was certainly impracticable; but Whiston and Ditton might have retorted that they were nearer to the longitude than their satirist to the kingdom of heaven, or even to a bishopric. Arbuthnot, I think, here and elsewhere, reveals himself as the calculator who kept Swift right in his proportions in the matter of the Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, etc. Swift was very ignorant about things connected with number. He writes to Stella that he has discovered that leap-year comes every four years, and that all his life he had thought it came every three years. Did he begin with the mistake of Caesar's priests? Whether or no, when I find the person who did not understand leap-year inventing satellites of Mars in correct accordance with Kepler's third law, I feel sure he must have had help.
