e Restoration: he died in 1682. We have had a man of the
same office in our own day, the late Prof. Schumacher,[489] who made the
little Danish Observatory of Altona the junction of all the lines by which
astronomical information was conveyed from one country to another. When the
collision took place between Denmark and the Duchies, the English
Government, moved by the Astronomical Society, instructed its diplomatic
agents to represent strongly to the Danish Government, when occasion should
arise, the great importance of the Observatory of Altona to the
astronomical communications of the whole world. But Schumacher had his own
celebrated journal, the _Astronomische Nachrichten_, by which to work out
part of his plan; private correspondence was his supplementary assistant.
Collins had only correspondence to rely on. Nothing is better known than
that it was Collins's collection which furnished the materials put forward
by the Committee of the Royal Society in 1712, as a defence of Newton
against the partisans of Leibnitz. The noted _Commercium Epistolicum_ is
but the abbreviation of a title which runs on with "D. Johannis Collins et
aliorum ..."

The whole of this collection passed into the hands of {298} William
Jones,[490] the father of the Indian Judge of the same name, who died in
1749. Jones was originally a teacher, but was presented with a valuable
sinecure by the interest of George, second Earl of Macclesfield, the mover
of the bill for the change of style in Britain, who died President of the
Royal Society. This change of style may perhaps be traced to the union of
energies which were brought into concert by the accident of a common
teacher: Lord Macclesfield and Lord Chesterfield,[491] the mover and the
seconder, and Daval,[492] who drew the bill, were pupils of De Moivre.[493]
Jones, who was a respectable mathematician though not an inventor,
collected the largest mathematical library of his day, and became possessor
of the papers of Collins, which contained those of Oughtred[494] and
others. Some of these papers passed into the custody of the Royal Society:
but the bulk was either bequeathed to, or purchased by, Lord Macclesfield;
and thus they found their way to Shirburn Castle, where they still remain.

A little before 1836, this collection attracted the attention of a
searching inquirer into points of mathematical history, the late Professor
Rigaud,[495] who died in 1839. He examined the whole collection of