Airy declined to make an affidavit or
to take sides in the dispute, but he wrote a letter from which the
following is extracted: "I cannot have the least difficulty in
expressing my opinion that you have made a great advance in the
application of my method of correcting the compass in iron ships, by
your introduction of the use of short needles for the compass-cards.
In my original investigations, when the whole subject was in darkness,
I could only use existing means for experiment, namely the long-needle
compasses then existing. But when I applied mechanical theory to
explanation of the results, I felt grievously the deficiency of a
theory and the construction which it suggested (necessarily founded on
assumption that the proportion of the needle-length to the other
elements of measure is small) when the length of the needles was
really so great. I should possibly have used some construction like
yours, but the Government had not then a single iron vessel, and did
not seem disposed to urge the enquiry. You, under happier auspices,
have successfully carried it out, and, I fully believe, with much
advantage to the science."--He wrote a Paper for the Athenaeum and had
various correspondence on the subject of the Badbury Rings in
Dorsetshire, which he (and others) considered as identical with the
"Mons Badonicus" of Gildas, the site of an ancient British battle.
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