therefore I chose to adress this my answer to yourself as the person concernd. I wish you had been pleased to do the same, before you had acquainted the Royal Society with your sentiments about my paper. That might have spared some trouble to me, and perhaps to yourself.
If I take the meaning of this letter right, you pretend, Sir, and have acquainted the Royal Society with the pretention that the discovery of the things contained in a paper of mine presented last summer to the Royal Society (concerning the aberrations of Rays of Light, caused from the spherical figures of lenses, and the manner of conecting them) is not owing to me, but to yourself and you offer at two reasons for making good that pretention. The first is, because the notion of conecting the aberration of a lens by joining an other to it, that may produse an equal and contrary aberration is owing to you, and explained in a paper communicated by you to the Royal Society. (I suppose that printed in the transactions.) So that nothing has been left to be done by others, but to solve a mathematical problem, pointed out in this paper. Your second reason is, because you have solved that very problem yourself long ago, as Mr. Maskelyn shall at any time be ready to witness.
As I find things somewhat misrepresented in the abstract above I take leave to make a few remarks therupon.
1. The general notion of correcting the aberration of one lens by means of an equal and contrary aberration of another, is not owing to you, Sir, as you prentend but to Mr. Huygens, who has not contented himself with printing out or telling us in general terms that the thing may be done, but has really effected it in a particular case, having determinid the figure of a concave Eyeglass correcting the aberration of a plano-convex object-glass in a telescope as you may learn from the preface to his dioptrica, where his formulas for finding the radiuses of the two surfaces are to be found. If that was a sufficient reason for refusing the
