The most foolish and discreditable was certainly that of Davies; his unworthy attempt to depreciate the great historian's learning, and his captious, cavilling, acrimonious charges of petty inaccuracies and discreditable falsification gave the object of his attack an easy triumph.
This limits the accuracy of the result; and we can therefore replace the figure by another figure which coincides with it approximately, provided that the further inaccuracy so introduced is comparable with the original inaccuracies of measurement.
The relation between the inaccuracy of the data and the additional inaccuracy due to substitution of another figure is similar to the relation between the inaccuracies in mensuration of a figure which is supposed to be of a given form (§ 20).
His edition of the celebrated Codex vaticanus, completed in 1838, but not published (ostensibly on the ground of inaccuracies) till four years after his death (1858), is the least satisfactory of his labours and was superseded by the edition of Vercellone and Cozza (1868), which itself leaves much to be desired.
Norton's edition of the Reminiscences and his collection of Carlyle's Early Letters correct some of Froude's inaccuracies.
