THE CHINESE ASTRONOMICAL INSTRUMENTS AT POTSDAM.
ITo THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
SIR, —I may be allowed, perhaps, to add a few words to the letter which you kindly inserted in the Spectator of July 17th. Firstly, I received a friendly hint that the instruments at Pots- dam were not the Mongolian of the thirteenth century, but those of the Belgian Jesuit father, Ferdinand Verbiest, of the seventeenth century, and I was advised to refer to Lord Curzon's Problems of the Far East. That I did, and at p. 247 found the accurate information which I needed. Secondly, early in August I found myself at the Summer Meeting in Cambridge, and there met Colonel Pemberton, who had originally brought this subject up before the Central Asian Society in December, 1918, and Mr. John Baddeley, the author of Russia, Siberia, China (2 vols., Macmillan, 1919). Not unnaturally, the conversation turned on the Chinese astrono- mical instruments, the issue being that, under the-escort of Mr. Yule Oldham, of King's College, we found ourselves in the University Library, our object being to refer to Mr. Baddeley's book. That book contains a full and interesting account of Ferdinand Verbiest, but the paragraph which appealed to me most was this: " The results of his (Verbiest's) labours, iraper- feet still—for he had left Europe before the improvements of Halley, Cassini and others—are now a shameful trophy at Potsdam. Let us hope they may one day be restored to Peking, or at least set up in Bruges or Brussels as a monument to one of Belgium's most illustrious sons." If you will kindly allow your widely read pages to eonvey this suggestion to the country and people which first confronted Germany in 1914 possibly some action may be taken.—I am, Sir, &c., Beckbury Hall, Shifnal. A.. C. YAM.
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