"By his invention of new and improved methods, machinery, and measuring instruments for grinding and polishing lenses, by his having the superintendence, after 1811, also of the work in glass-melting, enabling him to produce flint and crown glass in larger pieces, free of veins, but especially by his discovery of a method of computing accurately the forms of lenses, he has led practical optics into entirely new paths, and has raised the achromatic telescope to, until then, undreamed of perfection."