oke of irony.
Flinders strongly recommended that the Admiralty should appoint an
inspector of compasses, that there should be at every dockyard an officer
for re-touching compasses, and that a magnet for re-touching should be
carried on each flagship. The recommendations may seem like a counsel of
elementary precautions to-day, but they involved an important reform of
method in 1810.

Flinders also wrote on the theory of the tides; a set of notes on the
magnetism of the earth exists in manuscript; a manuscript of 106 pages,
consisting of a treatise on spheric trigonometry, is illustrated by
beautifully drawn diagrams, and includes an account of eight practical
methods of calculating latitude and five of calculating longitude. In
Mauritius he read all he could obtain about the history of the island,
and wrote a set of notes on Grant's History.

He was eager to praise the work of previous navigators. Laperouse was
especially a hero of his, and he wrote in French for the Societe
d'Emulation of Ile-de-France an account of the probable fate of that
celebrated sailor. In an eloquent passage in this essay, speaking of the
wreck, he cried: "O, Laperouse, my heart speaks to me of the agony that
rent yours. Ah, your eyes beheld the hapless companions of your dangers
and your glory fall one after another exhausted into the sea. Ah, your
eyes saw the fruit of vast and useful labours lost to the world. I think
of your sorrowing family. The picture is too painful for me to dwell upon
it; but at least when all human hope abandoned you, then--the last
blessing that God gives to the good--a ray of consolation shone upon your
eyes, and showed you that beyond those furious waves which broke upon
your vessels and swept away from you your companions another refuge was
opened to your virtues by the angel of pity."

Knowing the extreme difficulties attaching to navigation, even when in
the public interest he had to make a correction in the work of others, he
was anxious to cause no irritation. He sent to the editor of the Naval
Chronicle a correction in Horsburgh's Directions for Sailing to and from
the East Indies, but requested the editor to submit it first to the
author of that work, and to suppress publication if Horsburg so desired.
He never expressed a tinge of regret that he had chosen a field of
professional employment wherein promotion and reward were not liberally
bestowed. Entering the Navy under influential auspices, in a period