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Norwood's two daughters brought their father additional pain by making poor marriages. One of the husbands, possibly incited by the vicar, continually laid small charges against Norwood in court, causing him much exasperation and necessitating repeated trips across Bermuda to defend himself.
諾伍德的兩個女兒的婚姻都不盡如人意，給她們的父親帶來了額外的痛苦。有個女婿可能受那位牧師的唆使，不斷為了小事去法院控告諾伍德，惹得他非常氣憤，還不得不經常去百慕大的那一頭為自己辯護。
Finally in the 1650s witch trials came to Bermuda and Norwood spent his final years in severe unease that his papers on trigonometry, with their arcane symbols, would be taken as communications with the devil and that he would be treated to a dreadful execution. So little is known of Norwood that it may in fact be that he deserved his unhappy declining years. What is certainly true is that he got them.
最后，在17世紀50年代，百慕大開始流行審訊巫師，諾伍德提心吊膽地度過了最后的歲月，擔心自己那些帶有神秘符號的三角學論文會被看做在跟魔鬼交流，自己會被可怕地判處死刑。我們對諾伍德的情況知之甚少，反正他在不愉快環境中度過了晚年，實際上也許是活該。肯定沒錯的是，他的晚年確實是這樣度過的。
Meanwhile, the momentum for determining the Earth's circumference passed to France. There, the astronomer Jean Picard devised an impressively complicated method of triangulation involving quadrants, pendulum clocks, zenith sectors, and telescopes (for observing the motions of the moons of Jupiter).
與此同時，測定地球周長的勢頭已經到達法國。在那里，天文學家讓•皮卡爾發明了一種極其復雜的三角測繪法，用上了扇形板、擺鐘、天頂象限儀和天文望遠鏡（用來觀察土星衛星的運動）。
After two years of trundling and triangulating his way across France, in 1669 he announced a more accurate measure of 110.46 kilometers for one degree of arc. This was a great source of pride for the French, but it was predicated on the assumption that the Earth was a perfect sphere—which Newton now said it was not.
他花了兩年時間穿越法國，用三角測繪法進行測量；之后，他宣布了一個更加精確的測量結果：1度經線為110.46公里。法國人為此感到非常自豪，但這個結果是建立在地球是個圓球這個假設上的--而現在牛頓說地球不是這種形狀的。
