Flamsteed compared favourably with many observers by not merely taking and recording observations, but by performing also the tedious process known as reduction (§ 218), whereby the results of the observation are put into a form suitable for use by other astronomers; this process is usually performed in modern observatories by assistants, but in Flamsteed’s case had to be done almost exclusively by the astronomer himself. From this and other causes he was extremely slow in publishing observations; we have already alluded (chapter IX., § 192) to the difficulty which Newton had in extracting lunar observations from him, and after a time a feeling that the object for which the Observatory had been founded was not being fulfilled became pretty general among astronomers. Flamsteed always suffered from bad health as well as from the pecuniary and other difficulties which have been referred to; moreover he was much more anxious that his observations should be kept back till they were as accurate as possible, than that they should be published in a less perfect form and used for the researches which he once called “Mr. Newton’s crotchets”; consequently he took remonstrances about the delay in the publication of his observations in bad part. Some painful quarrels occurred between Flamsteed on the one hand and Newton and Halley on the other. The last straw was the unauthorised publication in 1712, under the editorship of Halley, of a volume of Flamsteed’s observations, a proceeding to which Flamsteed not unnaturally replied by calling Halley a “malicious thief.” Three years later he succeeded in getting hold of all the unsold copies and in destroying them, but fortunately he was also stimulated to prepare for publication an authentic edition. The _Historia Coelestis Britannica_, as he called the book, contained an immense series of observations made both before and during his career at Greenwich, but the most important and permanently valuable part was a catalogue of the places of nearly 3,000 stars.[112] Flamsteed himself only lived just long enough to finish the second of the three volumes; the third was edited by his assistants _Abraham Sharp_ (1651-1742) and _Joseph Crosthwait_; and the whole was published in 1725. Four years later still appeared his valuable Star-Atlas, which long remained in common use.