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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Uses of Astronomy, by Edward Everett
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Uses of Astronomy
+       An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856
+
+
+Author: Edward Everett
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 6, 2005  [eBook #16227]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE USES OF ASTRONOMY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Peter Barozzi, and the
+Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+(https://www.pgdp.net/) from page images generously made available by the
+Making of America Collection of the Digital & Multimedia Center, Michigan
+State University Libraries (http://digital.lib.msu.edu/)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through the
+      Digital & Multimedia Center, Michigan State University
+      Libraries. See
+      http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AAN1277.0001.001
+
+
+
+
+
+                          THE USES OF ASTRONOMY.
+
+
+                               AN ORATION
+
+
+             Delivered at Albany, on the 28th of July, 1856
+
+                                   BY
+
+                             EDWARD EVERETT,
+
+
+                                 ON THE
+
+               OCCASION OF THE INAUGURATION OF THE DUDLEY
+                        ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORY,
+
+
+                                 WITH A
+
+                   CONDENSED REPORT OF THE PROCEEDINGS,
+
+                          AND AN ACCOUNT OF THE
+
+              DEDICATION OF NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGICAL HALL.
+
+
+                               NEW YORK:
+                      PUBLISHED BY ROSS & TOUSEY,
+                           103 NASSAU STREET.
+                                 1856.
+
+
+
+
+                          A NOTE EXPLANATORY.
+
+     The undersigned ventures to put forth this report of Mr.
+     EVERETT'S Oration, in connection with a condensed account of the
+     Inauguration of the Dudley Observatory, and the Dedication of
+     the New State Geological Hall, at Albany,--in the hope that the
+     demand which has exhausted the newspaper editions, may exhaust
+     this as speedily as possible; not that he is particularly
+     tenacious of a reward for his own slight labors, but because he
+     believes that the extensive circulation of the record of the two
+     events so interesting and important to the cause of Science will
+     exercise a beneficial influence upon the public mind. The effort
+     of the distinguished Statesman who has invested Astronomy with
+     new beauties, is the latest and one of the most brilliant of
+     his compositions, and is already wholly out of print, though
+     scarcely a month has elapsed since the date of its delivery.
+     The account of the proceedings at Albany during the Ceremonies
+     of Inauguration is necessarily brief, but accurate, and is
+     respectfully submitted to the consideration of the reader.
+
+                                                    A. MAVERICK.
+     NEW YORK, _October 1, 1856._
+
+
+
+
+                    TWO NEW INSTITUTIONS OF SCIENCE;
+
+                                  AND
+
+              THE SCENES WHICH ATTENDED THEIR CHRISTENING.
+
+
+In the month of August last, two events took place in the city of
+Albany, which have more than an ephemeral interest. They occurred in
+close connection with the proceedings of a Scientific Convention,
+and the memory of them deserves to be cherished as a recollection of
+the easy way in which Science may be popularized and be rendered so
+generally acceptable that the people will cry, like Oliver Twist, for
+more. It is the purpose of this small publication to embody, in a form
+more durable than that of the daily newspaper, the record of proceedings
+which have so near a relation to the progress of scientific research. A
+marked feature in the ceremonies was the magnificent Oration of the Hon.
+EDWARD EVERETT, inaugurating the Dudley Observatory of Albany; and it is
+believed that the reissue of that speech in its present form will be
+acceptable to the admirers of that distinguished gentleman, not less
+than to the lovers of Science, who hung with delight upon his words.
+
+
+                 THE DEDICATION OF THE GEOLOGICAL HALL.
+
+On Wednesday, August 27, 1856, the State Geological Hall of New York
+was dedicated with appropriate ceremonies. For the purpose of affording
+accommodation to the immense crowds of people who, it was confidently
+anticipated, would throng to this demonstration and that of the
+succeeding day, at which Mr. EVERETT spoke, a capacious Tent was
+arranged with care in the center of Academy Park, on Capitol Hill;
+and under its shelter the ceremonies of the inauguration of both
+institutions were conducted without accident or confusion; attended on
+the first day by fully three thousand persons, and on the second by a
+number which may be safely computed at from five to seven thousand.
+
+The announcement that Hon. WM. H. SEWARD would be present at the
+dedication of the Geological Hall, excited great interest among the
+citizens; but the hope of his appearance proved fallacious. His place
+was occupied by seven picked men of the American Association for the
+Advancement of Science, one of whom (Prof. HENRY) declared his inability
+to compute the problem why seven men of science were to be considered
+equal to one statesman. The result justified the selections of the
+committee, and although the Senator was not present, the seven
+Commoners of Science made the occasion a most notable one by the flow
+of wit, elegance of phrase, solidity and cogency of argument, and rare
+discernment of natural truths, with which their discourse was garnished.
+
+The members of the American Association marched in procession to the
+Tent, from their place of meeting in the State Capitol. On the stage
+were assembled many distinguished gentlemen, and in the audience were
+hundreds of ladies. GOV. CLARK and Ex-Governors HUNT and SEYMOUR, of New
+York, Sir WM. LOGAN, of Canada, Hon. GEORGE BANCROFT, and others as well
+known as these, were among the number present. The tent was profusely
+decorated. Small banners in tri-color were distributed over the entire
+area covered by the stage, and adorned the wings. The following
+inscriptions were placed over the front of the rostrum,--that in honor
+of "_The Press_" occupying a central position:
+
+                GEOLOGY.                  THE PRESS.
+                METEOROLOGY.              MINERALOGY.
+                METALLURGY.               ETHNOLOGY.
+                              ASTRONOMY.
+
+The following were arranged in various positions on the right and left:
+
+                CHEMISTRY.                TELEGRAPH.
+                PHYSIOLOGY.               LETTERS.
+                CONCHOLOGY.               HYDROLOGY.
+                PALÆONTOLOGY.             ZOOLOGY.
+                MICROSCOPY.               ICHTHYOLOGY.
+                ART.                      MANUFACTURES.
+                STEAM.                    AGRICULTURE.
+                COMMERCE.                 PHYSICS.
+                SCIENCE.                  ANATOMY.
+                NAVIGATION.               BOTANY.
+
+The proceedings of the day were opened with prayer by Rev. GEO. W.
+BETHUNE, D.D., of Brooklyn.
+
+Hon. GARRIT Y. LANSING, of Albany, then introduced Professor LOUIS
+AGASSIZ, of Cambridge, Mass., who was the first of the "seven men
+of science" to entertain his audience, always with the aid of the
+inevitable black-board, without which the excellent Professor would be
+as much at a loss as a chemist without a laboratory. Professor AGASSIZ
+spoke for an hour, giving his views of a new theory of animal
+development. He began by saying:--
+
+     We are here to inaugurate the Geological Hall, which has grown
+     out of the geological survey of the State. To make the occasion
+     memorable, a distinguished statesman of your own State, and Mr.
+     FRANK C. GRAY, were expected to be present and address you. The
+     pressure of public duties has detained Mr. SEWARD, and severe
+     sickness has detained Mr. GRAY. I deeply lament that the occasion
+     is lost to you to hear my friend Mr. GRAY, who is a devotee to
+     science, and as warm-hearted a friend as ever I knew. Night
+     before last I was requested to assist in taking their place--I,
+     who am the most unfit of men for the post. I never made a speech.
+     I have addressed learned bodies, but I lack that liberty of
+     speech--the ability to present in finished style, and with that
+     rich imagery which characterize the words of the orator, the
+     thoughts fitting to such an occasion as this. He would limit
+     himself, he continued, to presenting some motives why the
+     community should patronize science, and foster such institutions
+     as this. We scientific men regard this as an occasion of the
+     highest interest, and thus do not hesitate to give the sanction
+     of the highest learned body of the country as an indorsement of
+     the liberality of this State. The geological survey of New York
+     has given to the world a new nomenclature. No geologist can,
+     hereafter, describe the several strata of the earth without
+     referring to it. Its results, as recorded in your published
+     volumes, are treasured in the most valuable libraries of the
+     world. They have made this city famous; and now, when the
+     scientific geologist lands on your shore, his first question is,
+     "Which is the way to Albany? I want to see your fossils." But
+     Paleontology is only one branch of the subject, and many others
+     your survey has equally fostered.
+
+     He next proceeded to show that organized beings were organized
+     with reference to a plan, which the relations between different
+     animals, and between different plants, and between animals and
+     plants, everywhere exhibit;--drew sections of the body of a
+     fish, and of the bird, and of man, and pointed out that in each
+     there was the same central back-bone, the cavity above and
+     the ribbed cavity below the flesh on each side, and the skin
+     over all--showing that the maker of each possessed the same
+     thought--followed the same plan of structure. And upon that plan
+     He had made all the kinds of quadrupeds, 2,000 in number, all the
+     kinds of birds, 7,000 in number, all of the reptiles, 2,000 to
+     3,000 in number, all the fish, 10,000 to 12,000 in number. All
+     their forms may be derived as different expressions of the same
+     formula. There are only four of these great types; or, said he,
+     may I not call them the four tunes on which Divinity has played
+     the harmonies that have peopled, in living and beautiful reality,
+     the whole world?
+
+
+                 PROFESSOR HITCHCOCK ON REMINISCENCES.
+
+ERASTUS C. BENEDICT, Esq. of New York, introduced Prof. HITCHCOCK, of
+Amherst, as a gentleman whose name was very familiar, who had laid
+aside, voluntarily, the charge of one of the largest colleges in New
+England, but who could never lay aside the honors he had earned in the
+literature and science of geology.
+
+After a few introductory observations, Prof. HITCHCOCK said:--
+
+     This, I believe, is the first example in which a State Government
+     in our country has erected a museum for the exhibition of its
+     natural resources, its mineral and rock, its plants and animals,
+     living and fossil. And this seems to me the most appropriate spot
+     in the country for placing the first geological hall erected by
+     the Government; for the County of Albany was the district where
+     the first geological survey was undertaken, on this side of the
+     Atlantic, and, perhaps, the world. This was in 1820, and ordered
+     by that eminent philanthropist, Stephen Van Rensselaer, who,
+     three years later, appointed Prof. Eaton to survey, in like
+     manner, the whole region traversed by the Erie Canal. This was
+     the commencement of a work, which, during the last thirty years,
+     has had a wonderful expansion, reaching a large part of the
+     States of the Union, as well as Canada, Nova Scotia, and New
+     Brunswick, and, I might add, several European countries, where
+     the magnificent surveys now in progress did not commence till
+     after the survey of Albany and Rensselaer Counties. How glad
+     are we, therefore, to find on this spot the first Museum of
+     Economical Geology on this side of the Atlantic! Nay, embracing
+     as it does all the department of Natural History, I see in it
+     more than a European Museum of Economical Geology, splendid
+     though they are. I fancy, rather, that I see here the germ of a
+     Cis-Atlantic British Museum, or Garden of Plants.
+
+     North Carolina was the first State that ordered a geological
+     survey; and I have the pleasure of seeing before me the gentleman
+     who executed it, and in 1824-5 published a report of 140 pages.
+     I refer to Professor Olmstead, who, though he has since won
+     brighter laurels in another department of science, will always be
+     honored as the first commissioned State geologist in our land.
+
+Of the New York State Survey he said:--
+
+     This survey has developed the older fossiliferous rocks, with a
+     fullness and distinctness unknown elsewhere. Hence European
+     savans study the New York Reports with eagerness. In 1850, as I
+     entered the Woodwardian Museum, in the University of Cambridge,
+     in England, I found Professor McCoy busy with a collection of
+     Silurian fossils before him, which he was studying with Hall's
+     first volume of Paleontology as his guide; and in the splendid
+     volumes, entitled _British Paleozoric Rocks and Fossils_, which
+     appeared last year as the result of those researches, I find
+     Professor Hall denominated the great American Paleontologist. I
+     tell you, Sir, that this survey has given New York a reputation
+     throughout the learned world, of which she may well be proud. Am
+     I told that it will, probably, cost half a million? Very well.
+     The larger the sum, the higher will be the reputation of New
+     York for liberality; and what other half million expended in our
+     country, has developed so many new facts or thrown so much light
+     upon the history of the globe, or won so world-wide and enviable
+     a reputation?
+
+And of Geological Surveys in general:--
+
+     In regard to this matter of geological surveys, I can hardly
+     avoid making a suggestion here. So large a portion of our country
+     has now been examined, more or less thoroughly, by the several
+     State governments, that it does seem to me the time has come
+     when the National government should order a survey--geological,
+     zoological, and botanical--of the whole country, on such a
+     liberal and thorough plan as the surveys in Great Britain are
+     now conducted; in the latter country it being understood that at
+     least thirty years will be occupied in the work. Could not the
+     distinguished New York statesman who was to have addressed us
+     to-day be induced, when the present great struggle in which he
+     is engaged shall have been brought to a close, by a merciful
+     Providence, to introduce this subject, and urge it upon Congress?
+     And would it not be appropriate for the American Association
+     for the Advancement of Science to throw a petition before the
+     government for such an object? Or might it not, with the consent
+     of the eminent gentleman who has charge of the Coast Survey, be
+     connected therewith, as it is with the Ordnance Survey in Great
+     Britain.
+
+The history of the American Association was then given:--
+
+     Prof. Mather, I believe, through Prof. Emmons, first suggested to
+     the New-York Board of Geologists in November, 1838, in a letter
+     proposing a number of points for their consideration. I quote
+     from him the following paragraph relating to the meeting. As to
+     the credit he has here given me of having personally suggested
+     the subject, I can say only that I had been in the habit for
+     several years of making this meeting of scientific men a sort
+     of hobby in my correspondence with such. Whether others did the
+     same, I did not then, and do not now know. Were this the proper
+     place, I could go more into detail on this point; but I will
+     merely quote Prof. Mather's language to the Board:--
+
+       * * * * "Would it not be well to suggest the propriety of a
+     meeting of Geologists and other scientific men of our country at
+     some central point next fall,--say at New-York or Philadelphia?
+     There are many questions in our Geology that will receive new
+     light from friendly discussion and the combined observations of
+     various individuals who have noted them in different parts of our
+     country. Such a meeting has been suggested by Prof. Hitchcock;
+     and to me it seems desirable. It would undoubtedly be an
+     advantage not only to science but to the several surveys that are
+     now in progress and that may in future be authorized. It would
+     tend to make known our scientific men to each other personally,
+     give them more confidence in each other, and cause them to
+     concentrate their observation on those questions that are of
+     interest in either a scientific or economical point of view. More
+     questions may be satisfactorily settled in a day by oral
+     discussion in such a body, than a year by writing and
+     publication."[A]
+
+     [Footnote A: In the letter alluded to, on examination, we
+     discover another passage bearing on the point, which, owing to
+     the Professor's modesty we suspect, he did not read. Prof. Mather
+     adds. "You, so far as I know, first suggested the matter of such
+     an Association. I laid the matter before the Board of Geologists
+     of New-York, specifying some of the advantages that might be
+     expected to result; and Prof. Vanuxem probably made the motion
+     before the Board in regard to it."]
+
+     Though the Board adopted the plan of a meeting, various causes
+     delayed the first over till April, 1840, when we assembled in
+     Philadelphia, and spent a week in most profitable and pleasant
+     discussion, and the presentation of papers. Our number that year
+     was only 18, because confined almost exclusively to the State
+     geologists; but the next year, when we met again in Philadelphia,
+     and a more extended invitation was given, about eighty were
+     present; and the members have been increasing to the present
+     time. But, in fact, those first two meetings proved the type, in
+     all things essential, of all that have followed. The principal
+     changes have been those of expansion and the consequent
+     introduction of many other branches of science with their eminent
+     cultivators. In 1842, we changed the name to that of the
+     Association of American Geologists and Naturalists; and in 1847,
+     to that of the American Association for the Advancement of
+     Science. I trust it has not yet reached its fullest development,
+     as our country and its scientific men multiply, and new fields of
+     discovery open.
+
+Prof. H. said of this particular occasion:--
+
+     We may be quite sure that this Hall will be a center of deep
+     interest to coming generations. Long after we shall have passed
+     away will the men of New-York, as they survey these monuments,
+     feel stimulated to engage in other noble enterprises by this
+     work of their progenitors, and from many a distant part of the
+     civilized world will men come here to solve their scientific
+     questions, and to bring far-off regions into comparison with
+     this. New-York, then, by her liberal patronage, has not only
+     acquired an honorable name among those living in all civilized
+     lands, but has secured the voice of History to transmit her fame
+     to far-off generations.
+
+
+              SIR WILLIAM LOGAN ASKS "THE WAY TO ALBANY."
+
+Sir WILLIAM E. LOGAN, of Canada, in a brief speech acknowledged the
+services rendered by the New-York Survey to Canada. He should manifest
+ingratitude if he declined to unite in the joyful occasion of
+inaugurating the Museum which was to hold forever the evidence of the
+truth of its published results. The Survey of Canada had been ordered,
+and the Commission of five years twice renewed; and the last time, the
+provision for it was more than doubled. It happened to him, as Mr.
+Agassiz had said: after crossing the ocean first, the first thing he
+asked was, "Which is the way to Albany?" and when he arrived here, he
+found that with the aid of Prof. Hall's discoveries, he had only to take
+up the different formations as he had left them on the boundary line,
+and follow them into Canada. It was both a convenience and a necessity
+to adopt the New-York nomenclature, which was thus extended over an area
+six times as large as New-York. In Paris he heard De Vernier using the
+words Trenton and Niagara, as if they were household words. He was
+delighted to witness the impatience with which Barron inquired when the
+remaining volumes of the Paleontology of New-York would be published.
+Your Paleontological reputation, said he, has made New-York known,
+even among men not scientific, all over Europe. I hope you will not
+stop here, but will go on and give us in equally thorough, full, and
+magnificent style, the character of the Durassic and Cretaceous
+formations.
+
+
+                     PROFESSOR HENRY ON DUTCHMEN.
+
+Professor HENRY was at a loss to know by what process they had arrived
+at the conclusion that seven men of science must be substituted to fill
+the place of one distinguished statesman whom they had expected to hear.
+He prided himself on his Albany nativity. He was proud of the old Dutch
+character, that was the substratum of the city. The Dutch are hard to be
+moved, but when they do start their momentum is not as other men's in
+proportion to the velocity, but as the square of the velocity. So when
+the Dutchman goes three times as fast, he has nine times the force of
+another man. The Dutchman has an immense potentia agency, but it wants a
+small spark of Yankee enterprise to touch it off. In this strain the
+Professor continued, making his audience very merry, and giving them a
+fine chance to express themselves with repeated explosions of laughter.
+
+
+          PROFESSOR DAVIES ON THE PRACTICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE.
+
+Prof. CHARLES DAVIES was introduced by EX-GOVERNOR SEYMOUR, and spoke
+briefly, but humorously and very much to the point, in defense of the
+practical character of scientific researches. He said that to one
+accustomed to speak only on the abstract quantities of number and space,
+this was an unusual occasion, and this an unusual audience; and inquired
+how he could discuss the abstract forms of geometry, when he saw before
+him, in such profusion, the most beautiful real forms that Providence
+has vouchsafed to the life of man. He proposed to introduce and develop
+but a single train of thought--the unchangeable connection between what
+in common language is called the theoretical and practical, but in more
+technical phraseology, the ideal and the actual. The actual, or true
+practical, consists in the uses of the forces of nature, according to
+the laws of nature; and here we must distinguish between it and the
+empirical, which uses, or attempts to use, those forces, without a
+knowledge of the laws. The true practical, therefore, is the result, or
+actual, of an antecedent ideal. The ideal, full and complete, must exist
+in the mind before the actual can be brought forth according to the
+laws of science. Who, then, are the truly practical men of our age? Are
+they not those who are engaged most laboriously and successfully in
+investigating the great laws? Are they not those who are pressing out
+the boundaries of knowledge, and conducting the mind into new and
+unexplored regions, where there may yet be discovered a California of
+undeveloped thought? Is not the gentleman from Massachusetts (Professor
+Agassiz) the most practical man in our country in the department of
+Natural History, not because he has collected the greatest number of
+specimens, but because he has laid open to us all the laws of the animal
+kingdom? Are the formulas written on the black-board by the gentleman
+from Cambridge (Prof. Pierce) of no practical value, because they cannot
+be read by the uninstructed eye? A single line may contain the elements
+of the motions of all the heavenly bodies; and the eye of science,
+taking its stand-point at the center of gravity of the system, will
+see in the equation the harmonious revolutions of all the bodies which
+circle the heavens. It is such labors and such generalizations that have
+rendered his name illustrious in the history of mathematical science.
+Is it of no practical value that the Chief of the Coast Survey (Prof.
+Bache), by a few characters written upon paper, at Washington, has
+determined the exact time of high and low tide in the harbor of Boston,
+and can determine, by a similar process, the exact times of high and low
+water at every point on the surface of the globe? Are not these results,
+the highest efforts of science, also of the greatest practical utility?
+And may we not, then, conclude that _there is nothing truly practical
+which is not the consequence of an antecedent ideal_?
+
+Science is to art what the great fly-wheel and governor of a
+steam-engine are to the working part of the machinery--it guides,
+regulates, and controls the whole. Science and art are inseparably
+connected; like the Siamese Twins, they cannot be separated without
+producing the death of both.
+
+How, then, are we to regard the superb specimens of natural history,
+which the liberality, the munificence; and the wisdom of our State have
+collected at the Capitol? They are the elements from which we can here
+determine all that belongs to the Natural History of our State; and may
+we not indulge the hope, that science and genius will come here, and,
+striking them with a magic wand, cause the true practical to spring into
+immortal life?
+
+
+Remarks were also uttered by Prof. CHESTER DEWEY, President ANDERSON,
+and Rev. Dr. COX.
+
+And thus ended the Inauguration of the State Geological Hall.
+
+We turn to the Observatory, in regular order of succession.
+
+
+
+
+                  INAUGURATION OF DUDLEY OBSERVATORY.
+
+
+The Inauguration of the Dudley Observatory took place under the same
+tent which was appropriated to the dedication of the Geological Hall,
+and on the day following that event. An immense audience was assembled,
+drawn by the announcement of Mr. EVERETT'S Oration.
+
+At a little past three o'clock the procession of _savans_ arrived from
+the Assembly Chamber, escorted by the Burgesses Corps. Directly in front
+of the speaker's stand sat Mrs. DUDLEY, the venerable lady to whose
+munificence the world is indebted for this Observatory. She was dressed
+in an antique, olive-colored silk, with a figure of a lighter color, a
+heavy, red broché shawl, and her bonnet, cap, &c., after the strictest
+style of the old school. Her presence added a new point of interest.
+
+Prayer having been uttered by Rev. Dr. SPRAGUE, of Albany, THOMAS W.
+OLCOTT, Esq., introduced to the audience Ex-Governor WASHINGTON HUNT,
+who spoke briefly in honor of the memory of CHARLES E. DUDLEY, whose
+widow has founded and in part endowed this Observatory with a liberality
+so remarkable.
+
+Remarks were offered by Dr. B. A. GOULD and Prof. A. D. BACHE, and
+Judge HARRIS read the following letter from Mrs. DUDLEY, announcing
+another munificent donation in aid of the new Observatory--$50,000,
+in addition to the $25,000 which had been already expended in the
+construction of the building. The letter was received with shouts of
+applause, Prof. AGASSIZ rising and leading the vast assemblage in three
+vehement cheers in honor of Mrs. DUDLEY!
+
+                                        ALBANY, Thursday, Aug. 14, 1856.
+
+_To the Trustees of the Dudley Observatory:_
+
+     GENTLEMEN,--I scarcely need refer in a letter to you to the
+     modest beginning and gradual growth of the institution over which
+     you preside, and of which you are the responsible guardians. But
+     we have arrived at a period in its history when its inauguration
+     gives to it and to you some degree of prominence, and which must
+     stamp our past efforts with weakness and inconsideration, or
+     exalt those of the future to the measure of liberality necessary
+     to certain success.
+
+     You have a building erected and instruments engaged of unrivaled
+     excellence; and it now remains to carry out the suggestion of
+     the Astronomer Royal of England in giving permanency to the
+     establishment. The very distinguished Professors BACHE, PIERCE,
+     and GOULD, state in a letter, which I have been permitted to see,
+     that to expand this institution to the wants of American science
+     and the honors of a national character, will require an
+     investment which will yield annually not less than $10,000; and
+     these gentlemen say, in the letter referred to,--
+
+     "If the greatness of your giving can rise to this occasion, as
+     it has to all our previous suggestions, with such unflinching
+     magnanimity, we promise you our earnest and hearty coöperation,
+     and stake our reputation that the scientific success shall fill
+     up the measure of your hopes and anticipations."
+
+     For the attainment of an object so rich in scientific reward and
+     national glory, guaranteed by men with reputations as exalted and
+     enduring as the skies upon which they are written, contributions
+     should be general, and not confined to an individual or a place.
+
+     For myself, I offer, as my part of the required endowment, the
+     sum of $50,000 in addition to the advances which I have already
+     made; and, trusting that the name which you have given to the
+     Observatory may not be regarded as an undeserved compliment, and
+     that it will not diminish the public regard by giving to the
+     institution a seemingly individual character,
+
+                     I remain, Gentlemen, your obedient servant,
+                                                    BLANDINA DUDLEY.
+
+Judge HARRIS then introduced the Orator of the occasion, Hon. EDWARD
+EVERETT, whose speech is given verbatim in these pages.
+
+
+                THE INSTRUMENTS OF THE DUDLEY OBSERVATORY.
+
+During the Sessions of the American Association, the new Astronomical
+Instruments of Dudley Observatory were described in detail by Dr. B. A.
+GOULD, who is the Astronomer in charge. We condense his statements:--
+
+     The Meridian Circle and Transit instrument were ordered from
+     Pistor & Martins, the celebrated manufacturers of Berlin, by
+     whom the new instrument at Ann Arbor was made. A number of
+     improvements have been introduced in the Albany instruments, not
+     perhaps all absolutely new, but an eclectic combination of late
+     adaptations with new improvements. Dr. Gould made a distinction
+     of modern astronomical instruments into two classes, the English
+     and the German. The English is the massive type; the German,
+     light and airy. The English instrument is the instrument of the
+     engineer; the German, the instrument of the artist. In ordering
+     the instruments for the Albany Observatory, the Doctor preferred
+     the German type and discarded the heavier English. He instanced,
+     as a specimen of the latter, the new instrument at Greenwich,
+     recently erected under the superintendence of the Astronomer
+     Royal. That instrument registers observations in single seconds;
+     the Dudley instrument will register to tenths of seconds. That
+     has six or eight microscopes; this has four. That has a gas lamp,
+     by the light of which the graduations are read off; the Albany
+     instrument has no lamp, and the Doctor considered the lamp a
+     hazardous experiment, affecting the integrity of the experiment,
+     not only by its radiant heat but by the currents of heated air
+     which it produces. The diameter of the object-glass of the Albany
+     instrument is 7-1/2 French inches clear aperture, or 8 English
+     inches, and the length of the tube 8 feet. He would have
+     preferred an instrument in which the facilities of manipulation
+     would have been greater, but was hampered by one proviso, upon
+     which the Trustees of the institution insisted--that this should
+     be the biggest instrument of its kind; and the instruction was
+     obeyed. The glass was made by Chance, and ground by Pistor
+     himself. The eye-piece is fitted with two micrometers, for
+     vertical and horizontal observations. Another apparatus provides
+     for the detection and measurement of the flexure of the tube.
+     Much trouble was experienced in securing a good casting for the
+     steel axis of the instrument. Three were found imperfect under
+     the lathe, and the fourth was chosen; but even then the pivots
+     were made in separate pieces, which were set in very deeply and
+     welded. Dr. Gould said he had been requested by the gentlemen who
+     had this enterprise in charge to suggest, as a mark of respect to
+     a gentleman of Albany who was a munificent patron of Science,
+     that this instrument be known as the Olcott Meridian Circle.
+
+
+                     WHAT THE DUDLEY OBSERVATORY IS.
+
+It stands a mile from the Capitol, in the city of Albany, upon the crest
+of a hill, so difficult of approach, as to be in reality a Hill of
+Science. There are two ways of getting to it. In both cases there are
+rail fences to be clambered over, and long grass to wade through,
+settlements to explore, and a clayey road to travel; but these are minor
+troubles. The elevation of the hill above tide-water is, perhaps, 200
+feet; its distance from the Capitol about a mile and a half. The view
+for miles is unimpeded; and the Observatory is belted about with woods
+and verdant lawns. There could not be a finer location or a purer air.
+The plateau contains some fifteen acres.
+
+The Observatory is constructed in the form of a Latin cross. Its eastern
+arm is an apartment 22 by 24 feet, in which the meridian circle is to be
+placed. The western arm is a room of the same dimensions, intended for
+the transit instrument. From the north and south faces of both rooms
+are semi-circular apsides, projecting 6 feet 6 inches, containing the
+Collimator piers and the vertical openings for observation. The entire
+length of each room is, therefore, 37 feet. In the northern arm are
+placed the library, 23 feet by 27 feet; two computing rooms, 12 feet
+by 23 feet each; side entrance halls, staircases, &c. The southern arm
+contains the principal entrance, consisting of an arched colonnade of
+four Tuscan columns, surrounded by a pediment. A broad flight of stone
+steps leads to this colonnade; and through the entrance door beneath
+it to the main central hall, 28 feet square, in which are placed (in
+niches) the very beautiful electric clock and pendulum presented by
+Erastus Corning, Esq. The center of this hall is occupied by a massive
+pier of stone, 10 feet square, passing from the basement into the dome
+above, and intended for the support of the great heliometer. Directly
+opposite the entrance door is a large niche, in which it is proposed to
+place the bust of the late Mr. Dudley. Immediately above this hall is
+the equatorial room, a circular apartment, 22 feet 6 inches in diameter,
+and 24 feet high, covered by a low conical roof, in which and in the
+walls are the usual observing slits. The drum, or cylindrical portion,
+of this room is divided into two parts--the lower one fixed, the upper,
+revolving on cast-iron balls moving in grooved metal plates, can command
+the entire horizon.
+
+The building is in two stories--the upper of brick, with freestone
+quoins, impost and window and door dressings, rests upon a rusticated
+basement of freestone, six feet high. The style adopted is the modern
+Italian, of which it is a very excellent specimen. The building has been
+completed some time; but, in consequence of the size of the instruments
+now procured being greater than that originally contemplated, sundry
+alterations were required in the Transit and Meridian Circle rooms.
+These consist of the semi-circular projections already mentioned, and
+which, by varying the outlines of the building, will add greatly to its
+beauty and picturesqueness.
+
+The piers for the Meridian Circle and Transit have, after careful
+investigation, been procured from the Lockport quarries. The great
+density and uniformity of the structure of the stone, and the facility
+with which such large masses as are required for this purpose can be
+procured there, have induced the selection of these quarries. The stones
+will weigh from six and a half to eight tons each.
+
+The main building was erected from the drawings of Messrs. Woollett and
+Ogden, Architects, Albany; the additions and the machinery have been
+designed by Mr. W. Hodgins, Civil Engineer; and the latter is now being
+constructed under his superintendence, in a very superior manner, at the
+iron works of Messrs. Pruyn and Lansing, Albany.
+
+The entire building is a tasteful and elegant structure, much superior
+in architectural character to any other in America devoted to a similar
+purpose.
+
+
+
+
+                                ORATION.
+
+
+FELLOW CITIZENS OF ALBANY:--
+
+Assembled as we are, under your auspices, in this ancient and hospitable
+city, for an object indicative of a highly-advanced stage of scientific
+culture, it is natural, in the first place, to cast a historical glance
+at the past. It seems almost to surpass belief, though an unquestioned
+fact, that more than a century should have passed away, after Cabot had
+discovered the coast of North America for England, before any knowledge
+was gained of the noble river on which your city stands, and which was
+destined by Providence to determine, in after times, the position of the
+commercial metropolis of the Continent. It is true that Verazzano, a
+bold and sagacious Florentine navigator, in the service of France, had
+entered the Narrows in 1524, which he describes as a very large river,
+deep at its mouth, which forced its way through steep hills to the sea;
+but though he, like all the naval adventurers of that age, was sailing
+westward in search of a shorter passage to India, he left this part
+of the coast without any attempt to ascend the river; nor can it be
+gathered from his narrative that he believed it to penetrate far into
+the interior.
+
+
+                      VOYAGE OF HENDRICK HUDSON.
+
+Near a hundred years elapsed before that great thought acquired
+substance and form. In the spring of 1609, the heroic but unfortunate
+Hudson, one of the brightest names in the history of English maritime
+adventure, but then in the employment of the Dutch East India Company,
+in a vessel of eighty tons, bearing the very astronomical name of the
+_Half Moon_, having been stopped by the ice in the Polar Sea, in the
+attempt to reach the East by the way of Nova Zembla, struck over to the
+coast of America in a high northern latitude. He then stretched down
+southwardly to the entrance of Chesapeake Bay (of which he had gained
+a knowledge from the charts and descriptions of his friend, Captain
+Smith), thence returning to the north, entered Delaware Bay, standing
+out again to sea, arrived on the second of September in sight of the
+"high hills" of Neversink, pronouncing it "a good land to fall in with,
+and a pleasant land to see;" and, on the following morning, sending his
+boat before him to sound the way, passed Sandy Hook, and there came to
+anchor on the third of September, 1609; two hundred and forty-seven
+years ago next Wednesday. What an event, my friends, in the history of
+American population, enterprise, commerce, intelligence, and power--the
+dropping of that anchor at Sandy Hook!
+
+
+                     DISCOVERY OF THE HUDSON RIVER.
+
+Here he lingered a week, in friendly intercourse with the natives of New
+Jersey, while a boat's company explored the waters up to Newark Bay. And
+now the great question. Shall he turn back, like Verazzano, or ascend
+the stream? Hudson was of a race not prone to turn back, by sea or by
+land. On the eleventh of September he raised the anchor of the _Half
+Moon_, passed through the Narrows, beholding on both sides "as beautiful
+a land as one can tread on;" and floated cautiously and slowly up the
+noble stream--the first ship that ever rested on its bosom. He passed
+the Palisades, nature's dark basaltic Malakoff, forced the iron gateway
+of the Highlands, anchored, on the fourteenth, near West Point; swept
+onward and upward, the following day, by grassy meadows and tangled
+slopes, hereafter to be covered with smiling villages;--by elevated
+banks and woody heights, the destined site of towns and cities--of
+Newburg, Poughkeepsie, Catskill;--on the evening of the fifteenth
+arrived opposite "the mountains which lie from the river side," where
+he found "a very loving people and very old men;" and the day following
+sailed by the spot hereafter to be honored by his own illustrious name.
+One more day wafts him up between Schodac and Castleton; and here he
+landed and passed a day with the natives,--greeted with all sorts of
+barbarous hospitality,--the land "the finest for cultivation he ever set
+foot on," the natives so kind and gentle, that when they found he would
+not remain with them over night, and feared that he left them--poor
+children of nature!--because he was afraid of their weapons,--he, whose
+quarter-deck was heavy with ordnance,--they "broke their arrows in
+pieces, and threw them in the fire." On the following morning, with
+the early flood-tide, on the 19th of September, 1609, the _Half Moon_
+"ran higher up, two leagues above the Shoals," and came to anchor in
+deep water, near the site of the present city of Albany. Happy if he
+could have closed his gallant career on the banks of the stream which
+so justly bears his name, and thus have escaped the sorrowful and
+mysterious catastrophe which awaited him the next year!
+
+
+            CHAMPLAIN'S VOYAGE AND THE GROWTH OF COLONIES.
+
+But the discovery of your great river and of the site of your ancient
+city, is not the only event which renders the year 1609 memorable in the
+annals of America and the world. It was one of those years in which a
+sort of sympathetic movement toward great results unconsciously pervades
+the races and the minds of men. While Hudson discovered this mighty
+river and this vast region for the Dutch East India Company, Champlain,
+in the same year, carried the lilies of France to the beautiful
+lake which bears his name on your northern limits; the languishing
+establishments of England in Virginia were strengthened by the second
+charter granted to that colony; the little church of Robinson removed
+from Amsterdam to Leyden, from which, in a few years, they went forth,
+to lay the foundations of New England on Plymouth Rock; the seven United
+Provinces of the Netherlands, after that terrific struggle of forty
+years (the commencement of which has just been embalmed in a record
+worthy of the great event by an American historian) wrested from Spain
+the virtual acknowledgment of their independence, in the Twelve Years'
+Truce; and James the First, in the same year, granted to the British
+East India Company their first permanent charter,--corner-stone of an
+empire destined in two centuries to overshadow the East.
+
+
+                         GALILEO'S DISCOVERIES
+
+One more incident is wanting to complete the list of the memorable
+occurrences which signalize the year 1609, and one most worthy to be
+remembered by us on this occasion. Cotemporaneously with the events
+which I have enumerated--eras of history, dates of empire, the
+starting-point in some of the greatest political, social, and moral
+revolutions in our annals, an Italian astronomer, who had heard of the
+magnifying glasses which had been made in Holland, by which distant
+objects could be brought seemingly near, caught at the idea, constructed
+a telescope, and pointed it to the heavens. Yes, my friends, in the same
+year in which Hudson discovered your river and the site of your ancient
+town, in which Robinson made his melancholy hegira from Amsterdam to
+Leyden, Galileo Galilei, with a telescope, the work of his own hands,
+discovered the phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter; and now,
+after the lapse of less than two centuries and a half, on a spot then
+embosomed in the wilderness--the covert of the least civilized of all
+the races of men--we are assembled--descendants of the Hollanders,
+descendants of the Pilgrims, in this ancient and prosperous city, to
+inaugurate the establishment of a first-class Astronomical Observatory.
+
+
+                         EARLY DAYS OF ALBANY.
+
+One more glance at your early history. Three years after the landing of
+the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Fort Orange was erected, in the center of what
+is now the business part of the city of Albany; and, a few years later,
+the little hamlet of Beverswyck began to nestle under its walls. Two
+centuries ago, my Albanian friends, this very year, and I believe this
+very month of August, your forefathers assembled, not to inaugurate an
+observatory, but to lay the foundations of a new church, in the place of
+the rude cabin which had hitherto served them in that capacity. It was
+built at the intersection of Yonker's and Handelaar's, better known
+to you as State and Market streets. Public and private liberality
+coöperated in the important work. The authorities at the Fort gave
+fifteen hundred guilders; the patroon of that early day, with the
+liberality coëval with the name and the race, contributed a thousand;
+while the inhabitants, for whose benefit it was erected, whose numbers
+were small and their resources smaller, contributed twenty beavers "for
+the purchase of an oaken pulpit in Holland." Whether the largest part of
+this subscription was bestowed by some liberal benefactress, tradition
+has not informed us.
+
+
+                             NEW AMSTERDAM
+
+Nor is the year 1656 memorable in the annals of Albany alone. In
+that same year your imperial metropolis, then numbering about three
+hundred inhabitants, was first laid out as a city, by the name of New
+Amsterdam.[A] In eight years more, New Netherland becomes New York; Fort
+Orange and its dependent hamlet assumes the name of Albany. A century
+of various fortune succeeds; the scourge of French and Indian war is
+rarely absent from the land; every shock of European policy vibrates
+with electric rapidity across the Atlantic; but the year 1756 finds
+a population of 300,000 in your growing province. Albany, however,
+may still be regarded almost as a frontier settlement. Of the twelve
+counties into which the province was divided a hundred years ago, the
+county of Albany comprehended all that lay north and west of the city;
+and the city itself contained but about three hundred and fifty houses.
+
+[Footnote A: These historical notices are, for the most part, abridged
+from Mr. Brodhead's excellent history of New York.]
+
+
+                           TWO HUNDRED YEARS.
+
+One more century; another act in the great drama of empire; another
+French and Indian War beneath the banners of England; a successful
+Revolution, of which some of the most momentous events occurred within
+your limits; a union of States; a Constitution of Federal Government;
+your population carried to the St. Lawrence and the great Lakes, and
+their waters poured into the Hudson; your territory covered with a
+net-work of canals and railroads, filled with life and action, and
+power, with all the works of peaceful art and prosperous enterprise with
+all the institutions which constitute and advance the civilization of
+the age; its population exceeding that of the Union at the date of the
+Revolution; your own numbers twice as large as those of the largest city
+of that day, you have met together, my Friends, just two hundred years
+since the erection of the little church of Beverswyck, to dedicate a
+noble temple of science and to take a becoming public notice of the
+establishment of an institution, destined, as we trust, to exert a
+beneficial influence on the progress of useful knowledge at home and
+abroad, and through that on the general cause of civilization.
+
+
+                          SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS.
+
+You will observe that I am careful to say the progress of science "at
+home and abroad;" for the study of Astronomy in this country has long
+since, I am happy to add, passed that point where it is content to
+repeat the observations and verify the results of European research. It
+has boldly and successfully entered the field of original investigation,
+discovery, and speculation; and there is not now a single department of
+the science in which the names of American observers and mathematicians
+are not cited by our brethren across the water, side by side with the
+most eminent of their European contemporaries.
+
+This state of things is certainly recent. During the colonial period
+and in the first generation after the Revolution, no department of
+science was, for obvious causes, very extensively cultivated in
+America--astronomy perhaps as much as the kindred branches. The
+improvement in the quadrant, commonly known as Hadley's, had already
+been made at Philadelphia by Godfrey, in the early part of the last
+century; and the beautiful invention of the collimating telescope was
+made at a later period by Rittenhouse, an astronomer of distinguished
+repute. The transits of Venus of 1761 and 1769 were observed, and
+orreries were constructed in different parts of the country; and some
+respectable scientific essays are contained and valuable observations
+are recorded in the early volumes of the Transactions of the
+Philosophical Society, at Philadelphia, and the American Academy of Arts
+and Sciences at Boston and Cambridge. But in the absence of a numerous
+class of men of science to encourage and aid each other, without
+observatories and without valuable instruments, little of importance
+could be expected in the higher walks of astronomical life.
+
+
+                         AMERICAN OBSERVATIONS.
+
+The greater the credit due for the achievement of an enterprise
+commenced in the early part of the present century, and which would
+reflect honor on the science of any country and any age; I mean the
+translation and commentary on Laplace's _Mécanique Celeste_, by
+Bowditch; a work of whose merit I am myself wholly unable to form
+an opinion, but which I suppose places the learned translator and
+commentator on a level with the ablest astronomers and geometers of the
+day. This work may be considered as opening a new era in the history
+of American science. The country was still almost wholly deficient in
+instrumental power; but the want was generally felt by men of science,
+and the public mind in various parts of the country began to be turned
+towards the means of supplying it. In 1825, President John Quincy Adams
+brought the subject of a National Observatory before Congress. Political
+considerations prevented its being favorably entertained at that
+time; and it was not till 1842, and as an incident of the exploring
+expedition, that an appropriation was made for a dépôt for the charts
+and instruments of the Navy. On this modest basis has been reared the
+National Observatory at Washington; an institution which has already
+taken and fully sustains an honorable position among the scientific
+establishments of the age.
+
+Besides the institution at Washington, fifteen or twenty observatories
+have within the last few years, been established in different parts
+of the country, some of them on a modest scale, for the gratification
+of the scientific taste and zeal of individuals, others on a broad
+foundation of expense and usefulness. In these establishments,
+public and private, the means are provided for the highest order of
+astronomical observation, research, and instruction. There is already
+in the country an amount of instrumental power (to which addition
+is constantly making), and of mathematical skill on the part of our
+men of science, adequate to a manly competition with their European
+contemporaries. The fruits are already before the world, in the
+triangulation of several of the States, in the great work of the Coast
+Survey, in the numerous scientific surveys of the interior of the
+Continent, in the astronomical department of the Exploring Expedition,
+in the scientific expedition to Chili, in the brilliant hydrographical
+labors of the Observatory at Washington, in the published observations
+of Washington and Cambridge, in the Journal conducted by the Nestor
+of American Science, now in its eighth lustrum; in the _Sidereal
+Messenger_, the _Astronomical Journal_, and the _National Ephemeris_;
+in the great chronometrical expeditions to determine the longitude of
+Cambridge, better ascertained than that of Paris was till within the
+last year; in the prompt rectification of the errors in the predicted
+elements of Neptune; in its identification with Lalande's missing star,
+and in the calculation of its ephemeris; in the discovery of the
+satellite of Neptune, of the eighth satellite of Saturn, and of the
+innermost of its rings; in the establishment, both by observation and
+theory, of the non-solid character of Saturn's rings; in the separation
+and measurement of many double and triple stars, amenable only to
+superior instrumental power, in the immense labor already performed
+in preparing star catalogues, and in numerous accurate observations
+of standard stars; in the diligent and successful observation of the
+meteoric showers; in an extensive series of magnetic observations; in
+the discovery of an asteroid and ten or twelve telescopic comets; in
+the resolution of nebulæ which had defied every thing in Europe but
+Lord Rosse's great reflector; in the application of electricity to the
+measurement of differences in longitude; in the ascertainment of the
+velocity of the electro-magnetic fluid, and its truly wonderful uses
+in recording astronomical observations. These are but a portion of the
+achievements of American astronomical science within fifteen or twenty
+years, and fully justify the most sanguine anticipations of its further
+progress.
+
+How far our astronomers may be able to pursue their researches, will
+depend upon the resources of our public institutions, and the liberality
+of wealthy individuals in furnishing the requisite means. With the
+exception of the observatories at Washington and West Point, little
+can be done, or be expected to be done, by the government of the Union
+or the States; but in this, as in every other department of liberal
+art and science, the great dependence,--and may I not add, the safe
+dependence?--as it ever has been, must continue to be upon the bounty of
+enlightened, liberal, and public-spirited individuals.
+
+
+                         THE DUDLEY OBSERVATORY.
+
+It is by a signal exercise of this bounty, my Friends, that we are
+called together to-day. The munificence of several citizens of this
+ancient city, among whom the first place is due to the generous lady
+whose name has with great propriety been given to the institution, has
+furnished the means for the foundation of the Dudley Observatory at
+Albany. On a commanding elevation on the northern edge of the city,
+liberally given for that purpose by the head of a family in which the
+patronage of science is hereditary, a building of ample dimensions has
+been erected, upon a plan which combines all the requisites of solidity,
+convenience, and taste. A large portion of the expense of the structure
+has been defrayed by Mrs. Blandina Dudley; to whose generosity, and that
+of several other public-spirited individuals, the institution is also
+indebted for the provision which has been made for an adequate supply of
+first-class instruments, to be executed by the most eminent makers in
+Europe and America; and which, it is confidently expected, will yield to
+none of their class in any observatory in the world.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: Prof. Loomis, in _Harper's Magazine_ for June, p. 49.]
+
+With a liberal supply of instrumental power; established in a community
+to whose intelligence and generosity its support may be safely confided,
+and whose educational institutions are rapidly realizing the conception
+of a university; countenanced by the gentleman who conducts the United
+States Coast Survey with such scientific skill and administrative
+energy; committed to the immediate supervision of an astronomer to
+whose distinguished talent had been added the advantage of a thorough
+scientific education in the most renowned universities of Europe, and
+who, as the editor of the _American Astronomical Journal_, has shown
+himself to be fully qualified for the high trust;--under these favorable
+circumstances, the Dudley Observatory at Albany takes its place among
+the scientific foundations of the country and the world.
+
+
+                          WONDERS OF ASTRONOMY.
+
+It is no affected modesty which leads me to express the regret that this
+interesting occasion could not have taken place under somewhat different
+auspices. I feel that the duty of addressing this great and enlightened
+assembly, comprising so much of the intelligence of the community and of
+the science of the country, ought to have been elsewhere assigned; that
+it should have devolved upon some one of the eminent persons, many of
+whom I see before me, to whom you have been listening the past week,
+who, as observers and geometers, could have treated the subject with a
+master's power; astronomers, whose telescopes have penetrated the depths
+of the heavens, or mathematicians, whose analysis unthreads the maze
+of their wondrous mechanism. If, instead of commanding, as you easily
+could have done, qualifications of this kind, your choice has rather
+fallen on one making no pretensions to the honorable name of a man of
+science,--but whose delight it has always been to turn aside from the
+dusty paths of active life, for an interval of recreation in the green
+fields of sacred nature in all her kingdoms,--it is, I presume, because
+you have desired on an occasion of this kind, necessarily of a popular
+character, that those views of the subject should be presented which
+address themselves to the general intelligence of the community, and
+not to its select scientific circles. There is, perhaps, no branch of
+science which to the same extent as astronomy exhibits phenomena which,
+while they task the highest powers of philosophical research, are also
+well adapted to arrest the attention of minds barely tinctured with
+scientific culture, and even to teach the sensibilities of the wholly
+uninstructed observer. The profound investigations of the chemist into
+the ultimate constitution of material nature, the minute researches of
+the physiologist into the secrets of animal life, the transcendental
+logic of the geometer, clothed in a notation, the very sight of which
+terrifies the uninitiated,--are lost on the common understanding. But
+the unspeakable glories of the rising and the setting sun; the serene
+majesty of the moon, as she walks in full-orbed brightness through the
+heavens; the soft witchery of the morning and the evening star; the
+imperial splendors of the firmament on a bright, unclouded night; the
+comet, whose streaming banner floats over half the sky,--these are
+objects which charm and astonish alike the philosopher and the peasant,
+the mathematician who weighs the masses and defines the orbits of the
+heavenly bodies, and the untutored observer who sees nothing beyond the
+images painted upon the eye.
+
+
+                  WHAT IS AN ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORY?
+
+An astronomical observatory, in the general acceptation of the word, is
+a building erected for the reception and appropriate use of astronomical
+instruments, and the accommodation of the men of science employed
+in making and reducing observations of the heavenly bodies. These
+instruments are mainly of three classes, to which I believe all others
+of a strictly astronomical character may be referred.
+
+1. The instruments by which the heavens are inspected, with a view to
+discover the existence of those celestial bodies which are not visible
+to the naked eye (beyond all comparison more numerous than those which
+are), and the magnitude, shapes, and other sensible qualities, both of
+those which are and those which are not thus visible to the unaided
+sight. The instruments of this class are designated by the general name
+of Telescope, and are of two kinds,--the refracting telescope, which
+derives its magnifying power from a system of convex lenses; and the
+reflecting telescope, which receives the image of the heavenly body upon
+a concave mirror.
+
+2d. The second class of instruments consists of those which are designed
+principally to measure the angular distances of the heavenly bodies
+from each other, and their time of passing the meridian. The transit
+instrument, the meridian circle, the mural circle, the heliometer,
+and the sextant, belong to this class. The brilliant discoveries
+of astronomy are, for the most part, made with the first class of
+instruments; its practical results wrought out by the second.
+
+3d. The third class contains the clock, with its subsidiary apparatus,
+for measuring the time and making its subdivisions with the greatest
+possible accuracy; indispensable auxiliary of all the instruments, by
+which the positions and motions of the heavenly bodies are observed, and
+measured, and recorded.
+
+
+                            THE TELESCOPE.
+
+The telescope may be likened to a wondrous cyclopean eye, endued with
+superhuman power, by which the astronomer extends the reach of his
+vision to the further heavens, and surveys galaxies and universes
+compared with which the solar system is but an atom floating in the air.
+The transit may be compared to the measuring rod which he lays from
+planet to planet, and from star to star, to ascertain and mark off the
+heavenly spaces, and transfer them to his note-book; the clock is that
+marvelous apparatus by which he equalizes and divides into nicely
+measured parts a portion of that unconceived infinity of duration,
+without beginning and without end, in which all existence floats as on a
+shoreless and bottomless sea.
+
+In the contrivance and the execution of these instruments, the utmost
+stretch of inventive skill and mechanical ingenuity has been put forth.
+To such perfection have they been carried, that a single second of
+magnitude or space is rendered a distinctly visible and appreciable
+quantity. "The arc of a circle," says Sir J. Herschell, "subtended by
+one second, is less than the 200,000th part of the radius, so that on a
+circle of six feet in diameter, it would occupy no greater linear extent
+than 1-5700 part of an inch, a quantity requiring a powerful microscope
+to be discerned at all."[A] The largest body in our system, the sun,
+whose real diameter is 882,000 miles, subtends, at a distance of
+95,000,000 miles, but an angle of little more than 32; while so
+admirably are the best instruments constructed, that both in Europe
+and America a satellite of Neptune, an object of comparatively
+inconsiderable diameter, has been discovered at a distance of 2,850
+millions of miles.
+
+[Footnote A: _Outlines_, § 131.]
+
+
+                 UTILITY OF ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATIONS.
+
+The object of an observatory, erected and supplied with instruments of
+this admirable construction, and at proportionate expense, is, as I have
+already intimated, to provide for an accurate and systematic survey
+of the heavenly bodies, with a view to a more correct and extensive
+acquaintance with those already known, and as instrumental power
+and skill in using it increase, to the discovery of bodies hitherto
+invisible, and in both classes to the determination of their distances,
+their relations to each other, and the laws which govern their
+movements.
+
+Why should we wish to obtain this knowledge? What inducement is there
+to expend large sums of money in the erection of observatories, and in
+furnishing them with costly instruments, and in the support of the men
+of science employed in making, discussing, and recording, for successive
+generations, those minute observations of the heavenly bodies?
+
+In an exclusively scientific treatment of this subject, an inquiry
+into its utilitarian relations would be superfluous--even wearisome.
+But on an occasion like the present, you will not, perhaps, think it
+out of place if I briefly answer the question, What is the use of an
+observatory, and what benefit may be expected from the operations of
+such an establishment in a community like ours?
+
+1. In the first place, then, we derive from the observations of the
+heavenly bodies which are made at an observatory, our only adequate
+measures of time, and our only means of comparing the time of one
+place with the time of another. Our artificial time-keepers--clocks,
+watches, and chronometers--however ingeniously contrived and admirably
+fabricated, are but a transcript, so to say, of the celestial motions,
+and would be of no value without the means of regulating them by
+observation. It is impossible for them, under any circumstances, to
+escape the imperfection of all machinery the work of human hands; and
+the moment we remove with our time-keeper east or west, it fails us. It
+will keep home time alone, like the fond traveler who leaves his heart
+behind him. The artificial instrument is of incalculable utility, but
+must itself be regulated by the eternal clock-work of the skies.
+
+
+         RELATIONS BETWEEN NATURAL PHENOMENA AND DAILY LIFE.
+
+This single consideration is sufficient to show how completely the daily
+business of life is affected and controlled by the heavenly bodies.
+It is they--and not our main-springs, our expansion balances, and our
+compensation pendulums--which give us our time. To reverse the line of
+Pope:
+
+            "'Tis with our watches as our judgments;--none
+              Go just alike, but each believes his own."
+
+But for all the kindreds and tribes and tongues of men--each upon their
+own meridian--from the Arctic pole to the equator, from the equator to
+the Antarctic pole, the eternal sun strikes twelve at noon, and the
+glorious constellations, far up in the everlasting belfries of the
+skies, chime twelve at midnight;--twelve for the pale student over his
+flickering lamp; twelve amid the flaming glories of Orion's belt, if he
+crosses the meridian at that fated hour; twelve by the weary couch of
+languishing humanity; twelve in the star-paved courts of the Empyrean;
+twelve for the heaving tides of the ocean; twelve for the weary arm of
+labor; twelve for the toiling brain; twelve for the watching, waking,
+broken heart; twelve for the meteor which blazes for a moment and
+expires; twelve for the comet whose period is measured by centuries;
+twelve for every substantial, for every imaginary thing, which exists in
+the sense, the intellect, or the fancy, and which the speech or thought
+of man, at the given meridian, refers to the lapse of time.
+
+Not only do we resort to the observation of the heavenly bodies for the
+means of regulating and rectifying our clocks, but the great divisions
+of day and month and year are derived from the same source. By the
+constitution of our nature, the elements of our existence are closely
+connected with celestial times. Partly by his physical organization,
+partly by the experience of the race from the dawn of creation, man as
+he is, and the times and seasons of the heavenly bodies, are part and
+parcel of one system. The first great division of time, the day-night
+(nychthemerum), for which we have no precise synonym in our language,
+with its primal alternation of waking and sleeping, of labor and rest,
+is a vital condition of the existence of such a creature as man. The
+revolution of the year, with its various incidents of summer and winter,
+and seed-time and harvest, is not less involved in our social, material,
+and moral progress. It is true that at the poles, and on the equator,
+the effects of these revolutions are variously modified or wholly
+disappear; but as the necessary consequence, human life is extinguished
+at the poles, and on the equator attains only a languid or feverish
+development. Those latitudes only in which the great motions and
+cardinal positions of the earth exert a mean influence, exhibit man in
+the harmonious expansion of his powers. The lunar period, which lies
+at the foundation of the _month_, is less vitally connected with human
+existence and development; but is proved by the experience of every age
+and race to be eminently conducive to the progress of civilization and
+culture.
+
+But indispensable as are these heavenly measures of time to our life and
+progress, and obvious as are the phenomena on which they rest, yet owing
+to the circumstance that, in the economy of nature, the day, the month,
+and the year are not exactly commensurable, some of the most difficult
+questions in practical astronomy are those by which an accurate division
+of time, applicable to the various uses of life, is derived from the
+observation of the heavenly bodies. I have no doubt that, to the Supreme
+Intelligence which created and rules the universe, there is a harmony
+hidden to us in the numerical relation to each other of days, months,
+and years; but in our ignorance of that harmony, their practical
+adjustment to each other is a work of difficulty. The great
+embarrassment which attended the reformation of the calendar, after the
+error of the Julian period had, in the lapse of centuries, reached ten
+(or rather twelve) days, sufficiently illustrates this remark. It is
+most true that scientific difficulties did not form the chief obstacle.
+Having been proposed under the auspices of the Roman pontiff, the
+Protestant world, for a century and more, rejected the new style.
+It was in various places the subject of controversy, collision, and
+bloodshed.[A] It was not adopted in England till nearly two centuries
+after its introduction at Rome; and in the country of Struve and the
+Pulkova equatorial, they persist at the present day in adding eleven
+minutes and twelve seconds to the length of the tropical year.
+
+[Footnote A: Stern's "_Himmelskunde_," p. 72.]
+
+
+                         GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE.
+
+2. The second great practical use of an Astronomical Observatory is
+connected with the science of geography. The first page of the history
+of our Continent declares this truth. Profound meditation on the
+sphericity of the earth was one of the main reasons which led Columbus
+to undertake his momentous voyage; and his thorough acquaintance with
+the astronomical science of that day was, in his own judgment, what
+enabled him to overcome the almost innumerable obstacles which attended
+its prosecution.[A] In return, I find that Copernicus in the very
+commencement of his immortal work _De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium_,
+fol. 2, appeals to the discovery of America as completing the
+demonstration of the sphericity of the earth. Much of our knowledge of
+the figure, size, density, and position of the earth, as a member of
+the solar system, is derived from this science; and it furnishes us
+the means of performing the most important operations of practical
+geography. Latitude and longitude, which lie at the basis of all
+descriptive geography, are determined by observation. No map deserves
+the name, on which the position of important points has not been
+astronomically determined. Some even of our most important political and
+administrative arrangements depend upon the coöperation of this science.
+Among these I may mention the land system of the United States, and the
+determination of the boundaries of the country. I believe that till it
+was done by the Federal Government, a uniform system of mathematical
+survey had never in any country been applied to an extensive territory.
+Large grants and sales of public land took place before the Revolution,
+and in the interval between the peace and the adoption of the
+Constitution; but the limits of these grants and sales were ascertained
+by sensible objects, by trees, streams, rocks, hills, and by reference
+to adjacent portions of territory, previously surveyed. The uncertainty
+of boundaries thus defined, was a never-failing source of litigation.
+Large tracts of land in the Western country, granted by Virginia
+under this old system of special and local survey, were covered with
+conflicting claims; and the controversies to which they gave rise
+formed no small part of the business of the Federal Court after its
+organization. But the adoption of the present land-system brought order
+out of chaos. The entire public domain is now scientifically surveyed
+before it is offered for sale; it is laid off into ranges, townships,
+sections, and smaller divisions, with unerring accuracy, resting on the
+foundation of base and meridian lines; and I have been informed that
+under this system, scarce a case of contested location and boundary has
+ever presented itself in court. The General Land Office contains maps
+and plans, in which every quarter-section of the public land is laid
+down with mathematical precision. The superficies of half a continent is
+thus transferred in miniature to the bureaus of Washington; while the
+local Land Offices contain transcripts of these plans, copies of which
+are furnished to the individual purchaser. When we consider the tide of
+population annually flowing into the public domain, and the immense
+importance of its efficient and economical administration, the utility
+of this application of Astronomy will be duly estimated.
+
+[Footnote A: Humboldt, _Histotre de la Geographie_, &c., Tom. 1,
+page 71.]
+
+I will here venture to repeat an anecdote, which I heard lately from
+a son of the late Hon. Timothy Pickering. Mr. Octavius Pickering, on
+behalf of his father, had applied to Mr. David Putnam of Marietta, to
+act as his legal adviser, with respect to certain land claims in the
+Virginia Military district, in the State of Ohio. Mr. Putnam declined
+the agency. He had had much to do with business of that kind, and found
+it beset with endless litigation. "I have never," he added, "succeeded
+but in a single case, and that was a location and survey made by General
+Washington before the Revolution; and I am not acquainted with any
+surveys, except those made by him, but what have been litigated."
+
+At this moment, a most important survey of the coast of the United
+States is in progress, an operation of the utmost consequence, in
+reference to the commerce, navigation, and hydrography of the country.
+The entire work, I need scarce say, is one of practical astronomy. The
+scientific establishment which we this day inaugurate is looked to for
+important coöperation in this great undertaking, and will no doubt
+contribute efficiently to its prosecution.
+
+Astronomical observation furnishes by far the best means of defining the
+boundaries of States, especially when the lines are of great length and
+run through unsettled countries. Natural indications, like rivers and
+mountains, however indistinct in appearance, are in practice subject to
+unavoidable error. By the treaty of 1783, a boundary was established
+between the United States and Great Britain, depending chiefly on the
+course of rivers and highlands dividing the waters which flow into the
+Atlantic Ocean from those which flow into the St. Lawrence. It took
+twenty years to find out which river was the true St. Croix, that being
+the starting point. England then having made the extraordinary discovery
+that the Bay of Fundy is not a part of the Atlantic Ocean, forty years
+more were passed in the unsuccessful attempt to re-create the highlands
+which this strange theory had annihilated; and just as the two countries
+were on the verge of a war, the controversy was settled by compromise.
+Had the boundary been accurately described by lines of latitude and
+longitude, no dispute could have arisen. No dispute arose as to the
+boundary between the United States and Spain, and her successor, Mexico,
+where it runs through untrodden deserts and over pathless mountains
+along the 42d degree of latitude. The identity of rivers may be
+disputed, as in the case of the St. Croix; the course of mountain chains
+is too broad for a dividing line; the division of streams, as experience
+has shown, is uncertain; but a degree of latitude is written on the
+heavenly sphere, and nothing but an observation is required to read the
+record.
+
+
+                         QUESTIONS OF BOUNDARY.
+
+But scientific elements, like sharp instruments, must be handled with
+scientific accuracy. A part of our boundary between the British
+Provinces ran upon the forty-fifth degree of latitude; and about forty
+years ago, an expensive fortress was commenced by the government of the
+United States, at Rouse's Point, on Lake Champlain, on a spot intended
+to be just within our limits. When a line came to be more carefully
+surveyed, the fortress turned out to be on the wrong side of the line;
+we had been building an expensive fortification for our neighbor. But in
+the general compromises of the Treaty of Washington by the Webster and
+Ashburton Treaty in 1842, the fortification was left within our
+limits.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: Webster's Works. Vol. V., 110, 115.]
+
+Errors still more serious had nearly resulted, a few years since, in
+a war with Mexico. By the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, the
+boundary line between the United States and that country was in part
+described by reference to the town of El Paso, as laid down on a
+specified map of the United States, of which a copy was appended to the
+treaty. This boundary was to be surveyed and run by a joint commission
+of men of science. It soon appeared that errors of two or three degrees
+existed in the projection of the map. Its lines of latitude and
+longitude did not conform to the topography of the region; so that it
+became impossible to execute the text of the treaty. The famous Mesilla
+Valley was a part of the debatable ground; and the sum of $10,000,000,
+paid to the Mexican Government for that and for an additional strip of
+territory on the southwest, was the smart-money which expiated the
+inaccuracy of the map--the necessary result, perhaps, of the want of
+good materials for its construction.
+
+It became my official duty in London, a few years ago, to apply to
+the British Government for an authentic statement of their claim to
+jurisdiction over New Zealand. The official _Gazette_ for the 2d of
+October, 1840, was sent me from the Foreign Office, as affording the
+desired information. This number of the _Gazette_ contained the
+proclamations issued by the Lieutenant Governor of New Zealand, "in
+pursuance of the instructions he received from the Marquis of Normanby,
+one of Her Majesty's principal Secretaries of State," asserting the
+jurisdiction of his government over the islands of New Zealand, and
+declaring them to extend "from 34° 30' North to 47° 10' South latitude."
+It is scarcely necessary to say that south latitude was intended in both
+instances. This error of 69° of latitude, which would have extended the
+claim of British jurisdiction over the whole breadth of the Pacific,
+had, apparently, escaped the notice of that government.
+
+
+                        COMMERCE AND NAVIGATION.
+
+It would be easy to multiply illustrations in proof of the great
+practical importance of accurate scientific designations, drawn from
+astronomical observations, in various relations connected with
+boundaries, surveys, and other geographical purposes; but I must hasten
+to
+
+3. A third important department, in which the services rendered by
+astronomy are equally conspicuous. I refer to commerce and navigation.
+It is mainly owing to the results of astronomical observation, that
+modern commerce has attained such a vast expansion, compared with that
+of the ancient world. I have already reminded you that accurate ideas
+in this respect contributed materially to the conception in the mind
+of Columbus of his immortal enterprise, and to the practical success
+with which it was conducted. It was mainly his skill in the use of
+astronomical instruments--imperfect as they were--which enabled him, in
+spite of the bewildering variation of the compass, to find his way
+across the ocean.
+
+With the progress of the true system of the universe toward general
+adoption, the problem of finding the longitude at sea presented itself.
+This was the avowed object of the foundation of the observatory at
+Greenwich;[A] and no one subject has received more of the attention of
+astronomers, than those investigations of the lunar theory on which
+the requisite tables of the navigator are founded. The pathways of the
+ocean are marked out in the sky above. The eternal lights of the heavens
+are the only Pharos whose beams never fail, which no tempest can shake
+from its foundation. Within my recollection, it was deemed a necessary
+qualification for the master and the mate of a merchant-ship, and even
+for a prime hand, to be able to "work a lunar," as it was called. The
+improvements in the chronometer have in practice, to a great extent,
+superseded this laborious operation; but observation remains,
+and unquestionably will for ever remain, the only dependence for
+ascertaining the ship's time and deducting the longitude from the
+comparison of that time with the chronometer.
+
+[Footnote A: Grant's _Physical Astronomy_, p. 460.]
+
+It may, perhaps, be thought that astronomical science is brought already
+to such a state of perfection that nothing more is to be desired, or at
+least that nothing more is attainable, in reference to such practicable
+applications as I have described. This, however, is an idea which
+generous minds will reject, in this, as in every other department of
+human knowledge. In astronomy, as in every thing else, the discoveries
+already made, theoretical or practical, instead of exhausting the
+science, or putting a limit to its advancement, do but furnish the means
+and instruments of further progress. I have no doubt we live on the
+verge of discoveries and inventions, in every department, as brilliant
+as any that have ever been made; that there are new truths, new facts,
+ready to start into recognition on every side; and it seems to me there
+never was an age, since the dawn of time, when men ought to be less
+disposed to rest satisfied with the progress already made, than the age
+in which we live; for there never was an age more distinguished for
+ingenious research, for novel result, and bold generalization.
+
+That no further improvement is desirable in the means and methods of
+ascertaining the ship's place at sea, no one I think will from
+experience be disposed to assert. The last time I crossed the Atlantic,
+I walked the quarter-deck with the officer in charge of the noble
+vessel, on one occasion, when we were driving along before a leading
+breeze and under a head of steam, beneath a starless sky at midnight, at
+the rate certainly of ten or eleven miles an hour. There is something
+sublime, but approaching the terrible, in such a scene;--the rayless
+gloom, the midnight chill,--the awful swell of the deep,--the dismal
+moan of the wind through the rigging, the all but volcanic fires within
+the hold of the ship. I scarce know an occasion in ordinary life in
+which a reflecting mind feels more keenly its hopeless dependence on
+irrational forces beyond its own control. I asked my companion how
+nearly he could determine his ship's place at sea under favorable
+circumstances. Theoretically, he answered, I think, within a
+mile;--practically and usually within three or four. My next question
+was, how near do you think we may be to Cape Race;--that dangerous
+headland which pushes its iron-bound unlighted bastions from the
+shore of Newfoundland far into the Atlantic,--first landfall to
+the homeward-bound American vessel. We must, said he, by our last
+observations and reckoning, be within three or four miles of Cape Race.
+A comparison of these two remarks, under the circumstances in which we
+were placed at the moment, brought my mind to the conclusion, that it is
+greatly to be wished that the means should be discovered of finding the
+ship's place more accurately, or that navigators would give Cape Race a
+little wider berth. But I do not remember that one of the steam packets
+between England and America was ever lost on that formidable point.
+
+It appears to me by no means unlikely that, with the improvement of
+instrumental power, and of the means of ascertaining the ship's time
+with exactness, as great an advance beyond the present state of art and
+science in finding a ship's place at sea may take place, as was effected
+by the invention of the reflecting quadrant, the calculation of lunar
+tables, and the improved construction of chronometers.
+
+
+                      BABBAGE'S DIFFERENCE MACHINE.
+
+In the wonderful versatility of the human mind, the improvement, when
+made, will very probably be made by paths where it is least expected.
+The great inducement to Mr. Babbage to attempt the construction of an
+engine by which astronomical tables could be calculated, and even
+printed, by mechanical means and with entire accuracy, was the errors
+in the requisite tables. Nineteen such errors, in point of fact, were
+discovered in an edition of Taylor's Logarithms printed in 1796; some
+of which might have led to the most dangerous results in calculating a
+ship's place. These nineteen errors, (of which one only was an error of
+the press), were pointed out in the _Nautical Almanac_ for 1832. In one
+of these _errata_ the seat of the error was stated to be in cosine of
+14° 18' 3". Subsequent examination showed that there was an error of one
+second in this correction; and, accordingly, in the _Nautical Almanac_
+of the next year a new correction was necessary. But in making the new
+correction of one second, a new error was committed of ten degrees.
+Instead of cosine 14° 18' 2" the correction was printed cosine 4° 18' 2"
+making it still necessary, in some future edition of the _Nautical
+Almanac_, to insert an _erratum_ in an _erratum_ of the _errata_ in
+Taylor's logarithms.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: Edinburgh Review, Vol. LIX., 282.]
+
+In the hope of obviating the possibility of such errors, Mr. Babbage
+projected his calculating, or, as he prefers to call it, his difference
+machine. Although this extraordinary undertaking has been arrested, in
+consequence of the enormous expense attending its execution, enough has
+been achieved to show the mechanical possibility of constructing an
+engine of this kind, and even one of far higher powers, of which Mr.
+Babbage has matured the conception, devised the notation, and executed
+the drawings--themselves an imperishable monument of the genius of the
+author.
+
+I happened on one occasion to be in company with this highly
+distinguished man of science, whose social qualities are as pleasing as
+his constructive talent is marvelous, when another eminent _savant_,
+Count Strzelecki, just returned from his Oriental and Australian tour,
+observed that he found among the Chinese, a great desire to know
+something more of Mr. Babbage's calculating machine, and especially
+whether, like their own _swampan_, it could be made to go into the
+pocket. Mr. Babbage good-humouredly observed that, thus far, he had been
+very much out of pocket with it.
+
+
+               INCREASED COMMAND OF INSTRUMENTAL POWER.
+
+Whatever advances may be made in astronomical science, theoretical
+or applied, I am strongly inclined to think that they will be made
+in connection with an increased command of instrumental power. The
+natural order in which the human mind proceeds in the acquisition
+of astronomical knowledge is minute and accurate observation of the
+phenomena of the heavens, the skillful discussion and analysis of these
+observations, and sound philosophy in generalizing the results.
+
+In pursuing this course, however, a difficulty presented itself, which
+for ages proved insuperable--and which to the same extent has existed
+in no other science, viz.: that all the leading phenomena are in their
+appearance delusive. It is indeed true that in all sciences superficial
+observation can only lead, except by chance, to superficial knowledge;
+but I know of no branch in which, to the same degree as in astronomy,
+the great leading phenomena are the reverse of true; while they yet
+appeal so strongly to the senses, that men who could foretell eclipses,
+and who discovered the precession of the equinoxes, still believed that
+the earth was at rest in the center of the universe, and that all the
+host of heaven performed a daily revolution about it as a center.
+
+It usually happens in scientific progress, that when a great fact is at
+length discovered, it approves itself at once to all competent judges.
+It furnishes a solution to so many problems, and harmonizes with so many
+other facts,--that all the other _data_ as it were crystallize at once
+about it. In modern times, we have often witnessed such an impatience,
+so to say, of great truths, to be discovered, that it has frequently
+happened that they have been found out simultaneously by more than one
+individual; and a disputed question of priority is an event of very
+common occurrence. Not so with the true theory of the heavens. So
+complete is the deception practiced on the senses, that it failed more
+than once to yield to the suggestion of the truth; and it was only when
+the visual organs were armed with an almost preternatural instrumental
+power, that the great fact found admission to the human mind.
+
+
+                         THE COPERNICAN SYSTEM.
+
+It is supposed that in the very dawn of science, Pythagoras or his
+disciples explained the apparent motion of the heavenly bodies about
+the earth by the diurnal revolution of the earth on its axis. But this
+theory, though bearing so deeply impressed upon it the great seal of
+truth, _simplicity_, was in such glaring contrast with the evidence of
+the senses, that it failed of acceptance in antiquity or the middle
+ages. It found no favor with minds like those of Aristotle, Archimedes,
+Hipparchus, Ptolemy, or any of the acute and learned Arabian or mediæval
+astronomers. All their ingenuity and all their mathematical skill were
+exhausted in the development of a wonderfully complicated and ingenious,
+but erroneous history. The great master truth, rejected for its
+simplicity, lay disregarded at their feet.
+
+At the second dawn of science, the great fact again beamed into the mind
+of Copernicus. Now, at least, in that glorious age which witnessed the
+invention of printing, the great mechanical engine of intellectual
+progress, and the discovery of America, we may expect that this
+long-hidden revelation, a second time proclaimed, will command the
+assent of mankind. But the sensible phenomena were still too strong
+for the theory; the glorious delusion of the rising and the setting
+sun could not be overcome. Tycho de Brahe furnished his Observatory
+with instruments superior in number and quality to all that had been
+collected before; but the great instrument of discovery, which, by
+augmenting the optic power of the eye, enables it to penetrate beyond
+the apparent phenomena, and to discern the true constitution of the
+heavenly bodies, was wanting at Uranienburg. The observations of Tycho
+as discussed by Kepler, conducted that most fervid, powerful, and
+sagacious mind to the discovery of some of the most important laws of
+the celestial motions; but it was not till Galileo, at Florence, had
+pointed his telescope to the sky, that the Copernican system could be
+said to be firmly established in the scientific world.
+
+
+                          THE HOME OF GALILEO.
+
+On this great name, my Friends, assembled as we are to dedicate a temple
+to instrumental Astronomy, we may well pause for a moment.
+
+There is much, in every way, in the city of Florence to excite the
+curiosity, to kindle the imagination, and to gratify the taste.
+Sheltered on the north by the vine-clad hills of Fiesoli, whose
+cyclopean walls carry back the antiquary to ages before the Roman,
+before the Etruscan power, the flowery city (Fiorenza) covers the sunny
+banks of the Arno with its stately palaces. Dark and frowning piles
+of mediæval structure; a majestic dome, the prototype of St. Peter's;
+basilicas which enshrine the ashes of some of the mightiest of the dead;
+the stone where Dante stood to gaze on the Campanile; the house of
+Michael Angelo, still occupied by a descendant of his lineage and name,
+his hammer, his chisel, his dividers, his manuscript poems, all as if
+he had left them but yesterday; airy bridges, which seem not so much to
+rest on the earth as to hover over the waters they span; the loveliest
+creations of ancient art, rescued from the grave of ages again to
+enchant the world; the breathing marbles of Michael Angelo, the glowing
+canvas of Raphael and Titian, museums filled with medals and coins of
+every age from Cyrus the younger, and gems and amulets and vases from
+the sepulchers of Egyptian Pharaohs coëval with Joseph, and Etruscan
+Lucumons that swayed Italy before the Romans,--libraries stored with the
+choicest texts of ancient literature,--gardens of rose and orange,
+and pomegranate, and myrtle,--the very air you breathe languid with
+music and perfume;--such is Florence. But among all its fascinations,
+addressed to the sense, the memory, and the heart, there was none
+to which I more frequently gave a meditative hour during a year's
+residence, than to the spot where Galileo Galilei sleeps beneath the
+marble door of Santa Croce; no building on which I gazed with greater
+reverence, than I did upon the modest mansion at Arcetri, villa at once
+and prison, in which that venerable sage, by command of the Inquisition,
+passed the sad closing years of his life. The beloved daughter on whom
+he had depended to smooth his passage to the grave, laid there before
+him; the eyes with which he had discovered worlds before unknown,
+quenched in blindness:
+
+               Ahime! quegli occhi si son fatti oscuri,
+               Che vider più di tutti i tempi antichi,
+               E luce fur dei secoli futuri.
+
+That was the house, "where," says Milton (another of those of whom the
+world was not worthy), "I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown
+old--a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking on astronomy otherwise
+than as the Dominican and Franciscan licensers thought."[A] Great
+Heavens! what a tribunal, what a culprit, what a crime! Let us thank
+God, my Friends, that we live in the nineteenth century. Of all the
+wonders of ancient and modern art, statues and paintings, and jewels and
+manuscripts,--the admiration and the delight of ages,--there was nothing
+which I beheld with more affectionate awe than that poor, rough tube,
+a few feet in length,--the work of his own hands,--that very "optic
+glass," through which the "Tuscan Artist" viewed the moon,
+
+              "At evening, from the top of Fesolé,
+               Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
+               Rivers, or mountains, in her spotty globe."
+
+that poor little spy-glass (for it is scarcely more) through which
+the human eye first distinctly beheld the surface of the moon--first
+discovered the phases of Venus, the satellites of Jupiter, and the
+seeming handles of Saturn--first penetrated the dusky depths of the
+heavens--first pierced the clouds of visual error, which, from the
+creation of the world, involved the system of the Universe.
+
+[Footnote A: Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 213.]
+
+There are occasions in life in which a great mind lives years of rapt
+enjoyment in a moment. I can fancy the emotions of Galileo, when, first
+raising the newly-constructed telescope to the heavens, he saw fulfilled
+the grand prophecy of Copernicus, and beheld the planet Venus crescent
+like the moon. It was such another moment as that when the immortal
+printers of Mentz and Strasburg received the first copy of the Bible
+into their hands, the work of their divine art; like that when Columbus,
+through the gray dawn of the 12th of October, 1492 (Copernicus, at the
+age of eighteen, was then a student at Cracow), beheld the shores of San
+Salvador; like that when the law of gravitation first revealed itself to
+the intellect of Newton; like that when Franklin saw by the stiffening
+fibers of the hempen cord of his kite, that he held the lightning in his
+grasp; like that when Leverrier received back from Berlin the tidings
+that the predicted planet was found.
+
+Yes, noble Galileo, thou art right, _E pur si muove._ "It does move."
+Bigots may make thee recant it; but it moves, nevertheless. Yes, the
+earth moves, and the planets move, and the mighty waters move, and the
+great sweeping tides of air move, and the empires of men move, and the
+world of thought moves, ever onward and upward to higher facts and
+bolder theories. The Inquisition may seal thy lips, but they can no more
+stop the progress of the great truth propounded by Copernicus, and
+demonstrated by thee, than they can stop the revolving earth.
+
+Close now, venerable sage, that sightless, tearful eye; it has seen
+what man never before saw--it has seen enough. Hang up that poor
+little spy-glass--it has done its work. Not Herschell nor Rosse have,
+comparatively, done more. Franciscans and Dominicans deride thy
+discoveries now; but the time will come when, from two hundred
+observatories in Europe and America, the glorious artillery of science
+shall nightly assault the skies, but they shall gain no conquests in
+those glittering fields before which thine shall be forgotten. Rest in
+peace, great Columbus of the heavens--like him scorned, persecuted,
+broken-hearted!--in other ages, in distant hemispheres, when the
+votaries of science, with solemn acts of consecration, shall dedicate
+their stately edifices to the cause of knowledge and truth, thy name
+shall be mentioned with honor.
+
+
+                 NEW PERIODS IN ASTRONOMICAL SCIENCE.
+
+It is not my intention, in dwelling with such emphasis upon the
+invention of the telescope, to ascribe undue importance, in promoting
+the advancement of science, to the increase of instrumental power.
+Too much, indeed, cannot be said of the service rendered by its
+first application in confirming and bringing into general repute the
+Copernican system; but for a considerable time, little more was effected
+by the wondrous instrument than the gratification of curiosity and
+taste, by the inspection of the planetary phases, and the addition
+of the rings and satellites of Saturn to the solar family. Newton,
+prematurely despairing of any further improvement in the refracting
+telescope, applied the principle of reflection; and the nicer
+observations now made, no doubt, hastened the maturity of his great
+discovery of the law of gravitation; but that discovery was the work of
+his transcendent genius and consummate skill.
+
+With Bradley, in 1741, a new period commenced in instrumental astronomy,
+not so much of discovery as of measurement. The superior accuracy and
+minuteness with which the motions and distances of the heavenly bodies
+were now observed, resulted in the accumulation of a mass of new
+materials, both for tabular comparison and theoretical speculation.
+These materials formed the enlarged basis of astronomical science
+between Newton and Sir William Herschell. His gigantic reflectors
+introduced the astronomer to regions of space before unvisited--extended
+beyond all previous conception the range of the observed phenomena, and
+with it proportionably enlarged the range of constructive theory. The
+discovery of a new primary planet and its attendant satellites was
+but the first step of his progress into the labyrinth of the heavens.
+Cotemporaneously with his observations, the French astronomers, and
+especially La Place, with a geometrical skill scarcely, if at all,
+inferior to that of its great author, resumed the whole system of
+Newton, and brought every phenomenon observed since his time within his
+laws. Difficulties of fact, with which he struggled in vain, gave way to
+more accurate observations; and problems that defied the power of his
+analysis, yielded to the modern improvements of the calculus.
+
+
+                      HERSCHELL'S NEBULAR THEORY.
+
+But there is no _Ultima Thule_ in the progress of science. With the
+recent augmentations of telescopic power, the details of the nebular
+theory, proposed by Sir W. Herschell with such courage and ingenuity,
+have been drawn in question. Many--most--of those milky patches in which
+he beheld what he regarded as cosmical matter, as yet in an unformed
+state,--the rudimental material of worlds not yet condensed,--have been
+resolved into stars, as bright and distinct as any in the firmament.
+I well recall the glow of satisfaction with which, on the 22d of
+September, 1847, being then connected with the University at Cambridge,
+I received a letter from the venerable director of the Observatory
+there, beginning with these memorable words:--"You will rejoice with
+me that the great nebula in Orion has yielded to the powers of our
+incomparable telescope! * * * It should be borne in mind that this
+nebula, and that of Andromeda [which has been also resolved at
+Cambridge], are the last strongholds of the nebular theory."[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Annals of the Observatory of Harvard College_, p. 121.]
+
+But if some of the adventurous speculations built by Sir William
+Herschell on the bewildering revelations of his telescope have been
+since questioned, the vast progress which has been made in sidereal
+astronomy, to which, as I understand, the Dudley Observatory will be
+particularly devoted, the discovery of the parallax of the fixed stars,
+the investigation of the interior relations of binary and triple systems
+of stars, the theories for the explanation of the extraordinary, not to
+say fantastic, shapes discerned in some of the nebulous systems--whirls
+and spirals radiating through spaces as vast as the orbit of Neptune;[A]
+the glimpses at systems beyond that to which our sun belongs;--these are
+all splendid results, which may fairly be attributed to the school of
+Herschell, and will for ever insure no secondary place to that name in
+the annals of science.
+
+[Footnote A: See the remarkable memoir of Professor Alexander, "On the
+origin of the forms and the present condition of some of the clusters of
+stars, and several of the nebulæ," (Gould's _Astronomical Journal_, Vol.
+iii, p. 95.)]
+
+
+                   RELATIONSHIP OF THE LIBERAL ARTS.
+
+In the remarks which I have hitherto made, I have had mainly in view
+the direct connection of astronomical science with the uses of life and
+the service of man. But a generous philosophy contemplates the subject
+in higher relations. It is a remark as old, at least, as Plato, and
+is repeated from him more than once by Cicero, that all the liberal
+arts have a common bond and relationship.[A] The different sciences
+contemplate as their immediate object the different departments of
+animate and inanimate nature; but this great system itself is but
+one, and its parts are so interwoven with each other, that the most
+extraordinary relations and unexpected analogies are constantly
+presenting themselves; and arts and sciences seemingly the least
+connected, render to each other the most effective assistance.
+
+[Footnote A: Archias, i.; De Oratore, iii., 21.]
+
+The history of electricity, galvanism, and magnetism, furnishes the most
+striking illustration of this remark. Commencing with the meteorological
+phenomena of our own atmosphere, and terminating with the observation
+of the remotest heavens, it may well be adduced, on an occasion like
+the present. Franklin demonstrated the identity of lightning and the
+electric fluid. This discovery gave a great impulse to electrical
+research, with little else in view but the means of protection from
+the thunder-cloud. A purely accidental circumstance led the physician
+Galvani, at Bologna, to trace the mysterious element, under conditions
+entirely novel, both of development and application. In this new form it
+became, in the hands of Davy, the instrument of the most extraordinary
+chemical operations; and earths and alkalis, touched by the creative
+wire, started up into metals that float on water, and kindle in the
+air. At a later period, the closest affinities are observed between
+electricity and magnetism, on the one hand; while, on the other, the
+relations of polarity are detected between acids and alkalis. Plating
+and gilding henceforth become electrical processes. In the last
+applications of the same subtle medium, it has become the messenger of
+intelligence across the land and beneath the sea; and is now employed by
+the astronomer to ascertain the difference of longitudes, to transfer
+the beats of the clock from one station to another, and to record the
+moment of his observations with automatic accuracy. How large a share
+has been borne by America in these magnificent discoveries and
+applications, among the most brilliant achievements of modern science,
+will sufficiently appear from the repetition of the names of Franklin,
+Henry, Morse, Walker, Mitchell, Lock, and Bond.
+
+
+                         VERSATILITY OF GENIUS.
+
+It has sometimes happened, whether from the harmonious relations to
+each other of every department of science, or from rare felicity of
+individual genius, that the most extraordinary intellectual versatility
+has been manifested by the same person. Although Newton's transcendent
+talent did not blaze out in childhood, yet as a boy he discovered great
+aptitude for mechanical contrivance. His water-clock, self-moving
+vehicle, and mill, were the wonder of the village; the latter propelled
+by a living mouse. Sir David Brewster represents the accounts as
+differing, whether the mouse was made to advance "by a string attached
+to its tail," or by "its unavailing attempts to reach a portion of corn
+placed above the wheel." It seems more reasonable to conclude that
+the youthful discoverer of the law of gravitation intended by the
+combination of these opposite attractions to produce a balanced
+movement. It is consoling to the average mediocrity of the race to
+perceive in these sportive assays, that the mind of Newton passed
+through the stage of boyhood. But emerging from boyhood, what a bound it
+made, as from earth to heaven! Hardly commencing bachelor of arts, at
+the age of twenty-four, he untwisted the golden and silver threads of
+the solar spectrum, simultaneously or soon after conceived the method of
+fluxions, and arrived at the elemental idea of universal gravity before
+he had passed to his master's degree. Master of Arts indeed! That
+degree, if no other, was well bestowed. Universities are unjustly
+accused of fixing science in stereotype. That diploma is enough of
+itself to redeem the honors of academical parchment from centuries of
+learned dullness and scholastic dogmatism.
+
+But the great object of all knowledge is to enlarge and purify the soul,
+to fill the mind with noble contemplations, to furnish a refined
+pleasure, and to lead our feeble reason from the works of nature up to
+its great Author and Sustainer. Considering this as the ultimate end of
+science, no branch of it can surely claim precedence of Astronomy. No
+other science furnishes such a palpable embodiment of the abstractions
+which lie at the foundation of our intellectual system; the great ideas
+of time, and space, and extension, and magnitude, and number, and
+motion, and power. How grand the conception of the ages on ages required
+for several of the secular equations of the solar system; of distances
+from which the light of a fixed star would not reach us in twenty
+millions of years, of magnitudes compared with which the earth is but a
+foot-ball; of starry hosts--suns like our own--numberless as the sands
+on the shore; of worlds and systems shooting through the infinite
+spaces, with a velocity compared with which the cannon-ball is a
+way-worn, heavy-paced traveler![A]
+
+[Footnote A: Nichol's _Architecture of the Heavens_, p. 160.]
+
+
+                    THE SPECTACLE OF THE HEAVENS.
+
+Much, however, as we are indebted to our observatories for elevating our
+conceptions of the heavenly bodies, they present, even to the unaided
+sight, scenes of glory which words are too feeble to describe. I had
+occasion, a few weeks since, to take the early train from Providence to
+Boston; and for this purpose rose at 2 o'clock in the morning. Every
+thing around was wrapped in darkness and hushed in silence, broken only
+by what seemed at that hour the unearthly clank and rush of the train.
+It was a mild, serene midsummer's night; the sky was without a
+cloud--the winds were whist. The moon, then in the last quarter, had
+just risen, and the stars shone with a spectral luster but little
+affected by her presence; Jupiter, two hours high, was the herald of the
+day; the Pleiades, just above the horizon, shed their sweet influence in
+the east; Lyra sparkled near the zenith; Andromeda veiled her newly
+discovered glories from the naked eye in the south; the steady Pointers,
+far beneath the pole, looked meekly up from the depths of the north to
+their sovereign.
+
+Such was the glorious spectacle as I entered the train. As we proceeded,
+the timid approach of twilight became more perceptible; the intense blue
+of the sky began to soften, the smaller stars, like little children,
+went first to rest; the sister-beams of the Pleiades soon melted
+together; but the bright constellations of the west and north remained
+unchanged. Steadily the wondrous transfiguration went on. Hands of
+angels hidden from mortal eyes shifted the scenery of the heavens; the
+glories of night dissolved into the glories of the dawn. The blue sky
+now turned more softly gray; the great watch-stars shut up their holy
+eyes; the east began to kindle. Faint streaks of purple soon blushed
+along the sky; the whole celestial concave was filled with the inflowing
+tides of the morning light, which came pouring down from above in one
+great ocean of radiance; till at length, as we reached the Blue Hills, a
+flash of purple fire blazed out from above the horizon, and turned the
+dewy teardrops of flower and leaf into rubies and diamonds. In a few
+seconds the everlasting gates of the morning were thrown wide open, and
+the lord of day, arrayed in glories too severe for the gaze of man,
+began his course.
+
+I do not wonder at the superstition of the ancient Magians, who in the
+morning of the world went up to the hill-tops of Central Asia, and
+ignorant of the true God, adored the most glorious work of his hand.
+But I am filled with amazement, when I am told that in this enlightened
+age, and in the heart of the Christian world, there are persons who can
+witness this daily manifestation of the power and wisdom of the Creator,
+and yet say in their hearts, "There is no God."
+
+
+                          UNDISCOVERED BODIES.
+
+Numerous as are the heavenly bodies visible to the naked eye, and
+glorious as are their manifestations, it is probable that in our own
+system there are great numbers as yet undiscovered. Just two hundred
+years ago this year, Huyghens announced the discovery of one satellite
+of Saturn, and expressed the opinion that the six planets and six
+satellites then known, and making up the perfect number of _twelve_,
+composed the whole of our planetary system. In 1729 an astronomical
+writer expressed the opinion that there might be other bodies in our
+system, but that the limit of telescopic power had been reached, and no
+further discoveries were likely to be made.[A] The orbit of one comet
+only had been definitively calculated. Since that time the power of the
+telescope has been indefinitely increased; two primary planets of the
+first class, ten satellites, and forty-three small planets revolving
+between Mars and Jupiter, have been discovered, the orbits of six or
+seven hundred comets, some of brief period, have been ascertained;--and
+it has been computed, that hundreds of thousands of these mysterious
+bodies wander through our system. There is no reason to think that all
+the primary planets, which revolve about the sun, have been discovered.
+An indefinite increase in the number of asteroids may be anticipated;
+while outside of Neptune, between our sun and the nearest fixed star,
+supposing the attraction of the sun to prevail through half the
+distance, there is room for ten more primary planets succeeding each
+other at distances increasing in a geometrical ratio. The first of
+these will, unquestionably, be discovered as soon as the perturbations
+of Neptune shall have been accurately observed; and with maps of the
+heavens, on which the smallest telescopic stars are laid down, it may be
+discovered much sooner.
+
+[Footnote A: _Memoirs of A.A.S._, vol. iii, 275.]
+
+
+                       THE VASTNESS OF CREATION.
+
+But it is when we turn our observation and our thoughts from our own
+system, to the systems which lie beyond it in the heavenly spaces, that
+we approach a more adequate conception of the vastness of creation. All
+analogy teaches us that the sun which gives light to us is but one of
+those countless stellar fires which deck the firmament, and that every
+glittering star in that shining host is the center of a system as vast
+and as full of subordinate luminaries as our own. Of these suns--centers
+of planetary systems--thousands are visible to the naked eye, millions
+are discovered by the telescope. Sir John Herschell, in the account of
+his operations at the Cape of Good Hope (p. 381) calculates that about
+five and a half millions of stars are visible enough to be _distinctly
+counted_ in a twenty-foot reflector, in both hemispheres. He adds, that
+"the actual number is much greater, there can be little doubt." His
+illustrious father, estimated on one occasion that 125,000 stars passed
+through the field of his forty foot reflector in a quarter of an hour.
+This would give 12,000,000 for the entire circuit of the heavens, in a
+single telescopic zone; and this estimate was made under the assumption
+that the nebulæ were masses of luminous matter not yet condensed into
+suns.
+
+These stupendous calculations, however, form but the first column of the
+inventory of the universe. Faint white specks are visible, even to the
+naked eye of a practiced observer in different parts of the heavens.
+Under high magnifying powers, several thousands of such spots are
+visible,--no longer however, faint, white specks, but many of them
+resolved by powerful telescopes into vast aggregations of stars, each
+of which may, with propriety, be compared with the milky way. Many of
+these nebulæ, however, resisted the power of Sir Wm. Herschell's great
+reflector, and were, accordingly, still regarded by him as masses of
+unformed matter, not yet condensed into suns. This, till a few years
+since, was, perhaps, the prevailing opinion; and the nebular theory
+filled a large space in modern astronomical science. But with the
+increase of instrumental power, especially under the mighty grasp of
+Lord Rosse's gigantic reflector, and the great refractors at Pulkova and
+Cambridge, the most irresolvable of these nebulæ have given way; and the
+better opinion now is, that every one of them is a galaxy, like our own
+milky way, composed of millions of suns. In other words, we are brought
+to the bewildering conclusion that thousands of these misty specks, the
+greater part of them too faint to be seen with the naked eye, are, not
+each a universe like our solar system, but each a "swarm" of universes
+of unappreciable magnitude.[A] The mind sinks, overpowered by the
+contemplation. We repeat the words, but they no longer convey distinct
+ideas to the understanding.
+
+[Footnote A: Humboldt's _Cosmos_, iii. 41.]
+
+
+                      CONCEPTIONS OF THE UNIVERSE.
+
+But these conclusions, however vast their comprehension, carry us but
+another step forward in the realms of sidereal astronomy. A proper
+motion in space of our sun, and of the fixed stars as we call them,
+has long been believed to exist. Their vast distances only prevent its
+being more apparent. The great improvement of instruments of measurement
+within the last generation has not only established the existence of
+this motion, but has pointed to the region in the starry vault around
+which our whole solar and stellar system, with its myriad of attendant
+planetary worlds, appears to be performing a mighty revolution. If,
+then, we assume that outside of the system to which we belong and in
+which our sun is but a star like Aldebaran or Sirius, the different
+nebulæ of which we have spoken,--thousands of which spot the
+heavens--constitute a distinct family of universes, we must, following
+the guide of analogy, attribute to each of them also, beyond all the
+revolutions of their individual attendant planetary systems, a great
+revolution, comprehending the whole; while the same course of analogical
+reasoning would lead us still further onward, and in the last analysis,
+require us to assume a transcendental connection between all these
+mighty systems--a universe of universes, circling round in the infinity
+of space, and preserving its equilibrium by the same laws of mutual
+attraction which bind the lower worlds together.
+
+It may be thought that conceptions like these are calculated rather to
+depress than to elevate us in the scale of being; that, banished as he
+is by these contemplations to a corner of creation, and there reduced
+to an atom, man sinks to nothingness in this infinity of worlds. But a
+second thought corrects the impression. These vast contemplations are
+well calculated to inspire awe, but not abasement. Mind and matter are
+incommensurable. An immortal soul, even while clothed in "this muddy
+vesture of decay," is in the eye of God and reason, a purer essence than
+the brightest sun that lights the depths of heaven. The organized human
+eye, instinct with life and soul, which, gazing through the telescope,
+travels up to the cloudy speck in the handle of Orion's sword, and bids
+it blaze forth into a galaxy as vast as ours, stands higher in the order
+of being than all that host of luminaries. The intellect of Newton which
+discovered the law that holds the revolving worlds together, is a nobler
+work of God than a universe of universes of unthinking matter.
+
+If, still treading the loftiest paths of analogy, we adopt the
+supposition,--to me I own the grateful supposition,--that the countless
+planetary worlds which attend these countless suns, are the abodes of
+rational beings like man, instead of bringing back from this exalted
+conception a feeling of insignificance, as if the individuals of our
+race were but poor atoms in the infinity of being, I regard it, on the
+contrary, as a glory of our human nature, that it belongs to a family
+which no man can number of rational natures like itself. In the order of
+being they may stand beneath us, or they may stand above us; _he_ may
+well be content with his place, who is made "a little lower than the
+angels."
+
+
+                     CONTEMPLATION OF THE HEAVENS.
+
+Finally, my Friends, I believe there is no contemplation better adapted
+to awaken devout ideas than that of the heavenly bodies,--no branch of
+natural science which bears clearer testimony to the power and wisdom of
+God than that to which you this day consecrate a temple. The heart of
+the ancient world, with all the prevailing ignorance of the true nature
+and motions of the heavenly orbs, was religiously impressed by their
+survey. There is a passage in one of those admirable philosophical
+treatises of Cicero composed in the decline of life, as a solace under
+domestic bereavement and patriotic concern at the impending convulsions
+of the state, in which, quoting from some lost work of Aristotle, he
+treats the topic in a manner which almost puts to shame the teachings of
+Christian wisdom.
+
+"Præclare ergo Aristoteles, 'Si essent,' inquit, 'qui sub terra semper
+habitavissent, bonis et illustribus domiciliis quæ essent ornata signis
+atque picturis, instructaque rebus iis omnibus quibus abundant ii qui
+beati putantur, nec tamen exissent unquam supra terram; accepissent
+autem fama et auditione, esse quoddam numen et vim Deorum,--deinde
+aliquo tempore patefactis terræ faucibus ex illis abditis sedibus
+evadere in hæc loca quæ nos incolimus, atque exire potuissent; cum
+repente terram et maria coelumque, vidissent; nubium magnitudinem
+ventorumque vim, cognovissent; aspexissentque solem, ejusque tum
+magnitudinem, pulchritudinemque; tum etiam efficientiam cognovissent,
+quod is diem efficeret, toto coelo luce diffusa; cum autem terras nox
+opacasset, tum coelum totum cernerent astris distinctum et ornatum,
+lunæque luminum varietatem tum crescentis tum senescentis, corumque
+omnium ortus et occasus atque in æternitate ratos immutabilesque
+cursus;--hæc cum viderent, profecto et esse Deos, et hæc tanta opera
+Deorum esse, arbitrarentur."[A]
+
+There is much by day to engage the attention of the Observatory; the
+sun, his apparent motions, his dimensions, the spots on his disc (to
+us the faint indications of movements of unimagined grandeur in his
+luminous atmosphere), a solar eclipse, a transit of the inferior
+planets, the mysteries of the spectrum;--all phenomena of vast
+importance and interest. But night is the astronomer's accepted time; he
+goes to his delightful labors when the busy world goes to its rest. A
+dark pall spreads over the resorts of active life; terrestrial objects,
+hill and valley, and rock and stream, and the abodes of men disappear;
+but the curtain is drawn up which concealed the heavenly hosts. There
+they shine and there they move, as they moved and shone to the eyes of
+Newton and Galileo, of Kepler and Copernicus, of Ptolemy and Hipparchus;
+yes, as they moved and shone when the morning stars sang together, and
+all the sons of God shouted for joy. All has changed on earth; but
+the glorious heavens remain unchanged. The plow passes over the site
+of mighty cities,--the homes of powerful nations are desolate, the
+languages they spoke are forgotten; but the stars that shone for them
+are shining for us; the same eclipses run their steady cycle; the same
+equinoxes call out the flowers of spring, and send the husbandman
+to the harvest; the sun pauses at either tropic as he did when his
+course began; and sun and moon, and planet and satellite, and star and
+constellation and galaxy, still bear witness to the power, the wisdom,
+and the love, which placed them in the heavens and uphold them there.
+
+[Footnote A: "Nobly does Aristotle observe, that if there were beings
+who had always lived under ground, in convenient, nay, in magnificent
+dwellings, adorned with statues and pictures, and every thing which
+belongs to prosperous life, but who had never come above ground; who had
+heard, however, by fame and report, of the being and power of the gods;
+if, at a certain time, the portals of the earth being thrown open,
+they had been able to emerge from those hidden abodes to the regions
+inhabited by us; when suddenly they had seen the earth, the sea, and
+the sky; had perceived the vastness of the clouds and the force of the
+winds; had contemplated the sun, his magnitude and his beauty, and
+still more his effectual power, that it is he who makes the day, by
+the diffusion of his light through the whole sky; and, when night had
+darkened the earth, should then behold the whole heavens studded and
+adorned with stars, and the various lights of the waxing and waning
+moon, the risings and the settings of all these heavenly bodies, and the
+courses fixed and immutable in all eternity; when, I say, they should
+see these things, truly they would believe that there were gods, and
+these so great things are their works."--Cicero, _De Natura Deorum_ lib.
+ii., § 30.]
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE USES OF ASTRONOMY***
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Uses of Astronomy, by Edward Everett
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Uses of Astronomy
+       An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856
+
+
+Author: Edward Everett
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 6, 2005  [eBook #16227]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE USES OF ASTRONOMY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Peter Barozzi, and the
+Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+(https://www.pgdp.net/) from page images generously made available by the
+Making of America Collection of the Digital & Multimedia Center, Michigan
+State University Libraries (http://digital.lib.msu.edu/)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through the
+      Digital & Multimedia Center, Michigan State University
+      Libraries. See
+      http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AAN1277.0001.001
+
+
+
+
+                          THE USES OF ASTRONOMY.
+
+
+                               AN ORATION
+
+
+             Delivered at Albany, on the 28th of July, 1856
+
+                                   BY
+
+                             EDWARD EVERETT,
+
+
+                                 ON THE
+
+               OCCASION OF THE INAUGURATION OF THE DUDLEY
+                        ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORY,
+
+
+                                 WITH A
+
+                   CONDENSED REPORT OF THE PROCEEDINGS,
+
+                          AND AN ACCOUNT OF THE
+
+              DEDICATION OF NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGICAL HALL.
+
+
+                               NEW YORK:
+                      PUBLISHED BY ROSS & TOUSEY,
+                           103 NASSAU STREET.
+                                 1856.
+
+
+
+
+                          A NOTE EXPLANATORY.
+
+     The undersigned ventures to put forth this report of Mr.
+     EVERETT'S Oration, in connection with a condensed account of the
+     Inauguration of the Dudley Observatory, and the Dedication of the
+     New State Geological Hall, at Albany,--in the hope that the
+     demand which has exhausted the newspaper editions, may exhaust
+     this as speedily as possible; not that he is particularly
+     tenacious of a reward for his own slight labors, but because he
+     believes that the extensive circulation of the record of the two
+     events so interesting and important to the cause of Science will
+     exercise a beneficial influence upon the public mind. The effort
+     of the distinguished Statesman who has invested Astronomy with
+     new beauties, is the latest and one of the most brilliant of his
+     compositions, and is already wholly out of print, though scarcely
+     a month has elapsed since the date of its delivery. The account
+     of the proceedings at Albany during the Ceremonies of
+     Inauguration is necessarily brief, but accurate, and is
+     respectfully submitted to the consideration of the reader.
+
+                                                    A. MAVERICK.
+     NEW YORK, _October 1, 1856._
+
+
+
+
+                    TWO NEW INSTITUTIONS OF SCIENCE;
+
+                                  AND
+
+              THE SCENES WHICH ATTENDED THEIR CHRISTENING.
+
+
+In the month of August last, two events took place in the city of
+Albany, which have more than an ephemeral interest. They occurred in
+close connection with the proceedings of a Scientific Convention, and
+the memory of them deserves to be cherished as a recollection of the
+easy way in which Science may be popularized and be rendered so
+generally acceptable that the people will cry, like Oliver Twist, for
+more. It is the purpose of this small publication to embody, in a form
+more durable than that of the daily newspaper, the record of proceedings
+which have so near a relation to the progress of scientific research. A
+marked feature in the ceremonies was the magnificent Oration of the Hon.
+EDWARD EVERETT, inaugurating the Dudley Observatory of Albany; and it is
+believed that the reissue of that speech in its present form will be
+acceptable to the admirers of that distinguished gentleman, not less
+than to the lovers of Science, who hung with delight upon his words.
+
+
+                 THE DEDICATION OF THE GEOLOGICAL HALL.
+
+On Wednesday, August 27, 1856, the State Geological Hall of New York was
+dedicated with appropriate ceremonies. For the purpose of affording
+accommodation to the immense crowds of people who, it was confidently
+anticipated, would throng to this demonstration and that of the
+succeeding day, at which Mr. EVERETT spoke, a capacious Tent was
+arranged with care in the center of Academy Park, on Capitol Hill; and
+under its shelter the ceremonies of the inauguration of both
+institutions were conducted without accident or confusion; attended on
+the first day by fully three thousand persons, and on the second by a
+number which may be safely computed at from five to seven thousand.
+
+The announcement that Hon. WM. H. SEWARD would be present at the
+dedication of the Geological Hall, excited great interest among the
+citizens; but the hope of his appearance proved fallacious. His place
+was occupied by seven picked men of the American Association for the
+Advancement of Science, one of whom (Prof. HENRY) declared his inability
+to compute the problem why seven men of science were to be considered
+equal to one statesman. The result justified the selections of the
+committee, and although the Senator was not present, the seven
+Commoners of Science made the occasion a most notable one by the flow of
+wit, elegance of phrase, solidity and cogency of argument, and rare
+discernment of natural truths, with which their discourse was garnished.
+
+The members of the American Association marched in procession to the
+Tent, from their place of meeting in the State Capitol. On the stage
+were assembled many distinguished gentlemen, and in the audience were
+hundreds of ladies. GOV. CLARK and Ex-Governors HUNT and SEYMOUR, of New
+York, Sir WM. LOGAN, of Canada, Hon. GEORGE BANCROFT, and others as well
+known as these, were among the number present. The tent was profusely
+decorated. Small banners in tri-color were distributed over the entire
+area covered by the stage, and adorned the wings. The following
+inscriptions were placed over the front of the rostrum,--that in honor
+of "_The Press_" occupying a central position:
+
+                GEOLOGY.                  THE PRESS.
+                METEOROLOGY.              MINERALOGY.
+                METALLURGY.               ETHNOLOGY.
+                              ASTRONOMY.
+
+The following were arranged in various positions on the right and left:
+
+                CHEMISTRY.                TELEGRAPH.
+                PHYSIOLOGY.               LETTERS.
+                CONCHOLOGY.               HYDROLOGY.
+                PALAEONTOLOGY.            ZOOLOGY.
+                MICROSCOPY.               ICHTHYOLOGY.
+                ART.                      MANUFACTURES.
+                STEAM.                    AGRICULTURE.
+                COMMERCE.                 PHYSICS.
+                SCIENCE.                  ANATOMY.
+                NAVIGATION.               BOTANY.
+
+The proceedings of the day were opened with prayer by Rev. GEO. W.
+BETHUNE, D.D., of Brooklyn.
+
+Hon. GARRIT Y. LANSING, of Albany, then introduced Professor LOUIS
+AGASSIZ, of Cambridge, Mass., who was the first of the "seven men of
+science" to entertain his audience, always with the aid of the
+inevitable black-board, without which the excellent Professor would be
+as much at a loss as a chemist without a laboratory. Professor AGASSIZ
+spoke for an hour, giving his views of a new theory of animal
+development. He began by saying:--
+
+     We are here to inaugurate the Geological Hall, which has grown
+     out of the geological survey of the State. To make the occasion
+     memorable, a distinguished statesman of your own State, and Mr.
+     FRANK C. GRAY, were expected to be present and address you. The
+     pressure of public duties has detained Mr. SEWARD, and severe
+     sickness has detained Mr. GRAY. I deeply lament that the occasion
+     is lost to you to hear my friend Mr. GRAY, who is a devotee to
+     science, and as warm-hearted a friend as ever I knew. Night
+     before last I was requested to assist in taking their place--I,
+     who am the most unfit of men for the post. I never made a speech.
+     I have addressed learned bodies, but I lack that liberty of
+     speech--the ability to present in finished style, and with that
+     rich imagery which characterize the words of the orator, the
+     thoughts fitting to such an occasion as this. He would limit
+     himself, he continued, to presenting some motives why the
+     community should patronize science, and foster such institutions
+     as this. We scientific men regard this as an occasion of the
+     highest interest, and thus do not hesitate to give the sanction
+     of the highest learned body of the country as an indorsement of
+     the liberality of this State. The geological survey of New York
+     has given to the world a new nomenclature. No geologist can,
+     hereafter, describe the several strata of the earth without
+     referring to it. Its results, as recorded in your published
+     volumes, are treasured in the most valuable libraries of the
+     world. They have made this city famous; and now, when the
+     scientific geologist lands on your shore, his first question is,
+     "Which is the way to Albany? I want to see your fossils." But
+     Paleontology is only one branch of the subject, and many others
+     your survey has equally fostered.
+
+     He next proceeded to show that organized beings were organized
+     with reference to a plan, which the relations between different
+     animals, and between different plants, and between animals and
+     plants, everywhere exhibit;--drew sections of the body of a fish,
+     and of the bird, and of man, and pointed out that in each there
+     was the same central back-bone, the cavity above and the ribbed
+     cavity below the flesh on each side, and the skin over
+     all--showing that the maker of each possessed the same
+     thought--followed the same plan of structure. And upon that plan
+     He had made all the kinds of quadrupeds, 2,000 in number, all the
+     kinds of birds, 7,000 in number, all of the reptiles, 2,000 to
+     3,000 in number, all the fish, 10,000 to 12,000 in number. All
+     their forms may be derived as different expressions of the same
+     formula. There are only four of these great types; or, said he,
+     may I not call them the four tunes on which Divinity has played
+     the harmonies that have peopled, in living and beautiful reality,
+     the whole world?
+
+
+                 PROFESSOR HITCHCOCK ON REMINISCENCES.
+
+ERASTUS C. BENEDICT, Esq. of New York, introduced Prof. HITCHCOCK, of
+Amherst, as a gentleman whose name was very familiar, who had laid
+aside, voluntarily, the charge of one of the largest colleges in New
+England, but who could never lay aside the honors he had earned in the
+literature and science of geology.
+
+After a few introductory observations, Prof. HITCHCOCK said:--
+
+     This, I believe, is the first example in which a State Government
+     in our country has erected a museum for the exhibition of its
+     natural resources, its mineral and rock, its plants and animals,
+     living and fossil. And this seems to me the most appropriate spot
+     in the country for placing the first geological hall erected by
+     the Government; for the County of Albany was the district where
+     the first geological survey was undertaken, on this side of the
+     Atlantic, and, perhaps, the world. This was in 1820, and ordered
+     by that eminent philanthropist, Stephen Van Rensselaer, who,
+     three years later, appointed Prof. Eaton to survey, in like
+     manner, the whole region traversed by the Erie Canal. This was
+     the commencement of a work, which, during the last thirty years,
+     has had a wonderful expansion, reaching a large part of the
+     States of the Union, as well as Canada, Nova Scotia, and New
+     Brunswick, and, I might add, several European countries, where
+     the magnificent surveys now in progress did not commence till
+     after the survey of Albany and Rensselaer Counties. How glad are
+     we, therefore, to find on this spot the first Museum of
+     Economical Geology on this side of the Atlantic! Nay, embracing
+     as it does all the department of Natural History, I see in it
+     more than a European Museum of Economical Geology, splendid
+     though they are. I fancy, rather, that I see here the germ of a
+     Cis-Atlantic British Museum, or Garden of Plants.
+
+     North Carolina was the first State that ordered a geological
+     survey; and I have the pleasure of seeing before me the gentleman
+     who executed it, and in 1824-5 published a report of 140 pages. I
+     refer to Professor Olmstead, who, though he has since won
+     brighter laurels in another department of science, will always be
+     honored as the first commissioned State geologist in our land.
+
+Of the New York State Survey he said:--
+
+     This survey has developed the older fossiliferous rocks, with a
+     fullness and distinctness unknown elsewhere. Hence European
+     savans study the New York Reports with eagerness. In 1850, as I
+     entered the Woodwardian Museum, in the University of Cambridge,
+     in England, I found Professor McCoy busy with a collection of
+     Silurian fossils before him, which he was studying with Hall's
+     first volume of Paleontology as his guide; and in the splendid
+     volumes, entitled _British Paleozoric Rocks and Fossils_, which
+     appeared last year as the result of those researches, I find
+     Professor Hall denominated the great American Paleontologist. I
+     tell you, Sir, that this survey has given New York a reputation
+     throughout the learned world, of which she may well be proud. Am
+     I told that it will, probably, cost half a million? Very well.
+     The larger the sum, the higher will be the reputation of New York
+     for liberality; and what other half million expended in our
+     country, has developed so many new facts or thrown so much light
+     upon the history of the globe, or won so world-wide and enviable
+     a reputation?
+
+And of Geological Surveys in general:--
+
+     In regard to this matter of geological surveys, I can hardly
+     avoid making a suggestion here. So large a portion of our country
+     has now been examined, more or less thoroughly, by the several
+     State governments, that it does seem to me the time has come when
+     the National government should order a survey--geological,
+     zoological, and botanical--of the whole country, on such a
+     liberal and thorough plan as the surveys in Great Britain are now
+     conducted; in the latter country it being understood that at
+     least thirty years will be occupied in the work. Could not the
+     distinguished New York statesman who was to have addressed us
+     to-day be induced, when the present great struggle in which he is
+     engaged shall have been brought to a close, by a merciful
+     Providence, to introduce this subject, and urge it upon Congress?
+     And would it not be appropriate for the American Association for
+     the Advancement of Science to throw a petition before the
+     government for such an object? Or might it not, with the consent
+     of the eminent gentleman who has charge of the Coast Survey, be
+     connected therewith, as it is with the Ordnance Survey in Great
+     Britain.
+
+The history of the American Association was then given:--
+
+     Prof. Mather, I believe, through Prof. Emmons, first suggested to
+     the New-York Board of Geologists in November, 1838, in a letter
+     proposing a number of points for their consideration. I quote
+     from him the following paragraph relating to the meeting. As to
+     the credit he has here given me of having personally suggested
+     the subject, I can say only that I had been in the habit for
+     several years of making this meeting of scientific men a sort of
+     hobby in my correspondence with such. Whether others did the
+     same, I did not then, and do not now know. Were this the proper
+     place, I could go more into detail on this point; but I will
+     merely quote Prof. Mather's language to the Board:--
+
+       * * * * "Would it not be well to suggest the propriety of a
+     meeting of Geologists and other scientific men of our country at
+     some central point next fall,--say at New-York or Philadelphia?
+     There are many questions in our Geology that will receive new
+     light from friendly discussion and the combined observations of
+     various individuals who have noted them in different parts of our
+     country. Such a meeting has been suggested by Prof. Hitchcock;
+     and to me it seems desirable. It would undoubtedly be an
+     advantage not only to science but to the several surveys that are
+     now in progress and that may in future be authorized. It would
+     tend to make known our scientific men to each other personally,
+     give them more confidence in each other, and cause them to
+     concentrate their observation on those questions that are of
+     interest in either a scientific or economical point of view. More
+     questions may be satisfactorily settled in a day by oral
+     discussion in such a body, than a year by writing and
+     publication."[A]
+
+     [Footnote A: In the letter alluded to, on examination, we
+     discover another passage bearing on the point, which, owing to
+     the Professor's modesty we suspect, he did not read. Prof. Mather
+     adds. "You, so far as I know, first suggested the matter of such
+     an Association. I laid the matter before the Board of Geologists
+     of New-York, specifying some of the advantages that might be
+     expected to result; and Prof. Vanuxem probably made the motion
+     before the Board in regard to it."]
+
+     Though the Board adopted the plan of a meeting, various causes
+     delayed the first over till April, 1840, when we assembled in
+     Philadelphia, and spent a week in most profitable and pleasant
+     discussion, and the presentation of papers. Our number that year
+     was only 18, because confined almost exclusively to the State
+     geologists; but the next year, when we met again in Philadelphia,
+     and a more extended invitation was given, about eighty were
+     present; and the members have been increasing to the present
+     time. But, in fact, those first two meetings proved the type, in
+     all things essential, of all that have followed. The principal
+     changes have been those of expansion and the consequent
+     introduction of many other branches of science with their eminent
+     cultivators. In 1842, we changed the name to that of the
+     Association of American Geologists and Naturalists; and in 1847,
+     to that of the American Association for the Advancement of
+     Science. I trust it has not yet reached its fullest development,
+     as our country and its scientific men multiply, and new fields of
+     discovery open.
+
+Prof. H. said of this particular occasion:--
+
+     We may be quite sure that this Hall will be a center of deep
+     interest to coming generations. Long after we shall have passed
+     away will the men of New-York, as they survey these monuments,
+     feel stimulated to engage in other noble enterprises by this work
+     of their progenitors, and from many a distant part of the
+     civilized world will men come here to solve their scientific
+     questions, and to bring far-off regions into comparison with
+     this. New-York, then, by her liberal patronage, has not only
+     acquired an honorable name among those living in all civilized
+     lands, but has secured the voice of History to transmit her fame
+     to far-off generations.
+
+
+              SIR WILLIAM LOGAN ASKS "THE WAY TO ALBANY."
+
+Sir WILLIAM E. LOGAN, of Canada, in a brief speech acknowledged the
+services rendered by the New-York Survey to Canada. He should manifest
+ingratitude if he declined to unite in the joyful occasion of
+inaugurating the Museum which was to hold forever the evidence of the
+truth of its published results. The Survey of Canada had been ordered,
+and the Commission of five years twice renewed; and the last time, the
+provision for it was more than doubled. It happened to him, as Mr.
+Agassiz had said: after crossing the ocean first, the first thing he
+asked was, "Which is the way to Albany?" and when he arrived here, he
+found that with the aid of Prof. Hall's discoveries, he had only to take
+up the different formations as he had left them on the boundary line,
+and follow them into Canada. It was both a convenience and a necessity
+to adopt the New-York nomenclature, which was thus extended over an area
+six times as large as New-York. In Paris he heard De Vernier using the
+words Trenton and Niagara, as if they were household words. He was
+delighted to witness the impatience with which Barron inquired when the
+remaining volumes of the Paleontology of New-York would be published.
+Your Paleontological reputation, said he, has made New-York known, even
+among men not scientific, all over Europe. I hope you will not stop
+here, but will go on and give us in equally thorough, full, and
+magnificent style, the character of the Durassic and Cretaceous
+formations.
+
+
+                     PROFESSOR HENRY ON DUTCHMEN.
+
+Professor HENRY was at a loss to know by what process they had arrived
+at the conclusion that seven men of science must be substituted to fill
+the place of one distinguished statesman whom they had expected to hear.
+He prided himself on his Albany nativity. He was proud of the old Dutch
+character, that was the substratum of the city. The Dutch are hard to be
+moved, but when they do start their momentum is not as other men's in
+proportion to the velocity, but as the square of the velocity. So when
+the Dutchman goes three times as fast, he has nine times the force of
+another man. The Dutchman has an immense potentia agency, but it wants a
+small spark of Yankee enterprise to touch it off. In this strain the
+Professor continued, making his audience very merry, and giving them a
+fine chance to express themselves with repeated explosions of laughter.
+
+
+          PROFESSOR DAVIES ON THE PRACTICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE.
+
+Prof. CHARLES DAVIES was introduced by EX-GOVERNOR SEYMOUR, and spoke
+briefly, but humorously and very much to the point, in defense of the
+practical character of scientific researches. He said that to one
+accustomed to speak only on the abstract quantities of number and space,
+this was an unusual occasion, and this an unusual audience; and inquired
+how he could discuss the abstract forms of geometry, when he saw before
+him, in such profusion, the most beautiful real forms that Providence
+has vouchsafed to the life of man. He proposed to introduce and develop
+but a single train of thought--the unchangeable connection between what
+in common language is called the theoretical and practical, but in more
+technical phraseology, the ideal and the actual. The actual, or true
+practical, consists in the uses of the forces of nature, according to
+the laws of nature; and here we must distinguish between it and the
+empirical, which uses, or attempts to use, those forces, without a
+knowledge of the laws. The true practical, therefore, is the result, or
+actual, of an antecedent ideal. The ideal, full and complete, must exist
+in the mind before the actual can be brought forth according to the laws
+of science. Who, then, are the truly practical men of our age? Are they
+not those who are engaged most laboriously and successfully in
+investigating the great laws? Are they not those who are pressing out
+the boundaries of knowledge, and conducting the mind into new and
+unexplored regions, where there may yet be discovered a California of
+undeveloped thought? Is not the gentleman from Massachusetts (Professor
+Agassiz) the most practical man in our country in the department of
+Natural History, not because he has collected the greatest number of
+specimens, but because he has laid open to us all the laws of the animal
+kingdom? Are the formulas written on the black-board by the gentleman
+from Cambridge (Prof. Pierce) of no practical value, because they cannot
+be read by the uninstructed eye? A single line may contain the elements
+of the motions of all the heavenly bodies; and the eye of science,
+taking its stand-point at the center of gravity of the system, will see
+in the equation the harmonious revolutions of all the bodies which
+circle the heavens. It is such labors and such generalizations that have
+rendered his name illustrious in the history of mathematical science. Is
+it of no practical value that the Chief of the Coast Survey (Prof.
+Bache), by a few characters written upon paper, at Washington, has
+determined the exact time of high and low tide in the harbor of Boston,
+and can determine, by a similar process, the exact times of high and low
+water at every point on the surface of the globe? Are not these results,
+the highest efforts of science, also of the greatest practical utility?
+And may we not, then, conclude that _there is nothing truly practical
+which is not the consequence of an antecedent ideal_?
+
+Science is to art what the great fly-wheel and governor of a
+steam-engine are to the working part of the machinery--it guides,
+regulates, and controls the whole. Science and art are inseparably
+connected; like the Siamese Twins, they cannot be separated without
+producing the death of both.
+
+How, then, are we to regard the superb specimens of natural history,
+which the liberality, the munificence; and the wisdom of our State have
+collected at the Capitol? They are the elements from which we can here
+determine all that belongs to the Natural History of our State; and may
+we not indulge the hope, that science and genius will come here, and,
+striking them with a magic wand, cause the true practical to spring into
+immortal life?
+
+
+Remarks were also uttered by Prof. CHESTER DEWEY, President ANDERSON,
+and Rev. Dr. COX.
+
+And thus ended the Inauguration of the State Geological Hall.
+
+We turn to the Observatory, in regular order of succession.
+
+
+
+
+                  INAUGURATION OF DUDLEY OBSERVATORY.
+
+
+The Inauguration of the Dudley Observatory took place under the same
+tent which was appropriated to the dedication of the Geological Hall,
+and on the day following that event. An immense audience was assembled,
+drawn by the announcement of Mr. EVERETT'S Oration.
+
+At a little past three o'clock the procession of _savans_ arrived from
+the Assembly Chamber, escorted by the Burgesses Corps. Directly in front
+of the speaker's stand sat Mrs. DUDLEY, the venerable lady to whose
+munificence the world is indebted for this Observatory. She was dressed
+in an antique, olive-colored silk, with a figure of a lighter color, a
+heavy, red broche shawl, and her bonnet, cap, &c., after the strictest
+style of the old school. Her presence added a new point of interest.
+
+Prayer having been uttered by Rev. Dr. SPRAGUE, of Albany, THOMAS W.
+OLCOTT, Esq., introduced to the audience Ex-Governor WASHINGTON HUNT,
+who spoke briefly in honor of the memory of CHARLES E. DUDLEY, whose
+widow has founded and in part endowed this Observatory with a liberality
+so remarkable.
+
+Remarks were offered by Dr. B. A. GOULD and Prof. A. D. BACHE, and
+Judge HARRIS read the following letter from Mrs. DUDLEY, announcing
+another munificent donation in aid of the new Observatory--$50,000, in
+addition to the $25,000 which had been already expended in the
+construction of the building. The letter was received with shouts of
+applause, Prof. AGASSIZ rising and leading the vast assemblage in three
+vehement cheers in honor of Mrs. DUDLEY!
+
+                                        ALBANY, Thursday, Aug. 14, 1856.
+
+_To the Trustees of the Dudley Observatory:_
+
+     GENTLEMEN,--I scarcely need refer in a letter to you to the
+     modest beginning and gradual growth of the institution over which
+     you preside, and of which you are the responsible guardians. But
+     we have arrived at a period in its history when its inauguration
+     gives to it and to you some degree of prominence, and which must
+     stamp our past efforts with weakness and inconsideration, or
+     exalt those of the future to the measure of liberality necessary
+     to certain success.
+
+     You have a building erected and instruments engaged of unrivaled
+     excellence; and it now remains to carry out the suggestion of the
+     Astronomer Royal of England in giving permanency to the
+     establishment. The very distinguished Professors BACHE, PIERCE,
+     and GOULD, state in a letter, which I have been permitted to see,
+     that to expand this institution to the wants of American science
+     and the honors of a national character, will require an
+     investment which will yield annually not less than $10,000; and
+     these gentlemen say, in the letter referred to,--
+
+     "If the greatness of your giving can rise to this occasion, as it
+     has to all our previous suggestions, with such unflinching
+     magnanimity, we promise you our earnest and hearty cooperation,
+     and stake our reputation that the scientific success shall fill
+     up the measure of your hopes and anticipations."
+
+     For the attainment of an object so rich in scientific reward and
+     national glory, guaranteed by men with reputations as exalted and
+     enduring as the skies upon which they are written, contributions
+     should be general, and not confined to an individual or a place.
+
+     For myself, I offer, as my part of the required endowment, the
+     sum of $50,000 in addition to the advances which I have already
+     made; and, trusting that the name which you have given to the
+     Observatory may not be regarded as an undeserved compliment, and
+     that it will not diminish the public regard by giving to the
+     institution a seemingly individual character,
+
+                     I remain, Gentlemen, your obedient servant,
+                                                    BLANDINA DUDLEY.
+
+Judge HARRIS then introduced the Orator of the occasion, Hon. EDWARD
+EVERETT, whose speech is given verbatim in these pages.
+
+
+                THE INSTRUMENTS OF THE DUDLEY OBSERVATORY.
+
+During the Sessions of the American Association, the new Astronomical
+Instruments of Dudley Observatory were described in detail by Dr. B. A.
+GOULD, who is the Astronomer in charge. We condense his statements:--
+
+     The Meridian Circle and Transit instrument were ordered from
+     Pistor & Martins, the celebrated manufacturers of Berlin, by whom
+     the new instrument at Ann Arbor was made. A number of
+     improvements have been introduced in the Albany instruments, not
+     perhaps all absolutely new, but an eclectic combination of late
+     adaptations with new improvements. Dr. Gould made a distinction
+     of modern astronomical instruments into two classes, the English
+     and the German. The English is the massive type; the German,
+     light and airy. The English instrument is the instrument of the
+     engineer; the German, the instrument of the artist. In ordering
+     the instruments for the Albany Observatory, the Doctor preferred
+     the German type and discarded the heavier English. He instanced,
+     as a specimen of the latter, the new instrument at Greenwich,
+     recently erected under the superintendence of the Astronomer
+     Royal. That instrument registers observations in single seconds;
+     the Dudley instrument will register to tenths of seconds. That
+     has six or eight microscopes; this has four. That has a gas lamp,
+     by the light of which the graduations are read off; the Albany
+     instrument has no lamp, and the Doctor considered the lamp a
+     hazardous experiment, affecting the integrity of the experiment,
+     not only by its radiant heat but by the currents of heated air
+     which it produces. The diameter of the object-glass of the Albany
+     instrument is 7-1/2 French inches clear aperture, or 8 English
+     inches, and the length of the tube 8 feet. He would have
+     preferred an instrument in which the facilities of manipulation
+     would have been greater, but was hampered by one proviso, upon
+     which the Trustees of the institution insisted--that this should
+     be the biggest instrument of its kind; and the instruction was
+     obeyed. The glass was made by Chance, and ground by Pistor
+     himself. The eye-piece is fitted with two micrometers, for
+     vertical and horizontal observations. Another apparatus provides
+     for the detection and measurement of the flexure of the tube.
+     Much trouble was experienced in securing a good casting for the
+     steel axis of the instrument. Three were found imperfect under
+     the lathe, and the fourth was chosen; but even then the pivots
+     were made in separate pieces, which were set in very deeply and
+     welded. Dr. Gould said he had been requested by the gentlemen who
+     had this enterprise in charge to suggest, as a mark of respect to
+     a gentleman of Albany who was a munificent patron of Science,
+     that this instrument be known as the Olcott Meridian Circle.
+
+
+                     WHAT THE DUDLEY OBSERVATORY IS.
+
+It stands a mile from the Capitol, in the city of Albany, upon the crest
+of a hill, so difficult of approach, as to be in reality a Hill of
+Science. There are two ways of getting to it. In both cases there are
+rail fences to be clambered over, and long grass to wade through,
+settlements to explore, and a clayey road to travel; but these are minor
+troubles. The elevation of the hill above tide-water is, perhaps, 200
+feet; its distance from the Capitol about a mile and a half. The view
+for miles is unimpeded; and the Observatory is belted about with woods
+and verdant lawns. There could not be a finer location or a purer air.
+The plateau contains some fifteen acres.
+
+The Observatory is constructed in the form of a Latin cross. Its eastern
+arm is an apartment 22 by 24 feet, in which the meridian circle is to be
+placed. The western arm is a room of the same dimensions, intended for
+the transit instrument. From the north and south faces of both rooms are
+semi-circular apsides, projecting 6 feet 6 inches, containing the
+Collimator piers and the vertical openings for observation. The entire
+length of each room is, therefore, 37 feet. In the northern arm are
+placed the library, 23 feet by 27 feet; two computing rooms, 12 feet by
+23 feet each; side entrance halls, staircases, &c. The southern arm
+contains the principal entrance, consisting of an arched colonnade of
+four Tuscan columns, surrounded by a pediment. A broad flight of stone
+steps leads to this colonnade; and through the entrance door beneath it
+to the main central hall, 28 feet square, in which are placed (in
+niches) the very beautiful electric clock and pendulum presented by
+Erastus Corning, Esq. The center of this hall is occupied by a massive
+pier of stone, 10 feet square, passing from the basement into the dome
+above, and intended for the support of the great heliometer. Directly
+opposite the entrance door is a large niche, in which it is proposed to
+place the bust of the late Mr. Dudley. Immediately above this hall is
+the equatorial room, a circular apartment, 22 feet 6 inches in diameter,
+and 24 feet high, covered by a low conical roof, in which and in the
+walls are the usual observing slits. The drum, or cylindrical portion,
+of this room is divided into two parts--the lower one fixed, the upper,
+revolving on cast-iron balls moving in grooved metal plates, can command
+the entire horizon.
+
+The building is in two stories--the upper of brick, with freestone
+quoins, impost and window and door dressings, rests upon a rusticated
+basement of freestone, six feet high. The style adopted is the modern
+Italian, of which it is a very excellent specimen. The building has been
+completed some time; but, in consequence of the size of the instruments
+now procured being greater than that originally contemplated, sundry
+alterations were required in the Transit and Meridian Circle rooms.
+These consist of the semi-circular projections already mentioned, and
+which, by varying the outlines of the building, will add greatly to its
+beauty and picturesqueness.
+
+The piers for the Meridian Circle and Transit have, after careful
+investigation, been procured from the Lockport quarries. The great
+density and uniformity of the structure of the stone, and the facility
+with which such large masses as are required for this purpose can be
+procured there, have induced the selection of these quarries. The stones
+will weigh from six and a half to eight tons each.
+
+The main building was erected from the drawings of Messrs. Woollett and
+Ogden, Architects, Albany; the additions and the machinery have been
+designed by Mr. W. Hodgins, Civil Engineer; and the latter is now being
+constructed under his superintendence, in a very superior manner, at the
+iron works of Messrs. Pruyn and Lansing, Albany.
+
+The entire building is a tasteful and elegant structure, much superior
+in architectural character to any other in America devoted to a similar
+purpose.
+
+
+
+
+                                ORATION.
+
+
+FELLOW CITIZENS OF ALBANY:--
+
+Assembled as we are, under your auspices, in this ancient and hospitable
+city, for an object indicative of a highly-advanced stage of scientific
+culture, it is natural, in the first place, to cast a historical glance
+at the past. It seems almost to surpass belief, though an unquestioned
+fact, that more than a century should have passed away, after Cabot had
+discovered the coast of North America for England, before any knowledge
+was gained of the noble river on which your city stands, and which was
+destined by Providence to determine, in after times, the position of the
+commercial metropolis of the Continent. It is true that Verazzano, a
+bold and sagacious Florentine navigator, in the service of France, had
+entered the Narrows in 1524, which he describes as a very large river,
+deep at its mouth, which forced its way through steep hills to the sea;
+but though he, like all the naval adventurers of that age, was sailing
+westward in search of a shorter passage to India, he left this part of
+the coast without any attempt to ascend the river; nor can it be
+gathered from his narrative that he believed it to penetrate far into
+the interior.
+
+
+                      VOYAGE OF HENDRICK HUDSON.
+
+Near a hundred years elapsed before that great thought acquired
+substance and form. In the spring of 1609, the heroic but unfortunate
+Hudson, one of the brightest names in the history of English maritime
+adventure, but then in the employment of the Dutch East India Company,
+in a vessel of eighty tons, bearing the very astronomical name of the
+_Half Moon_, having been stopped by the ice in the Polar Sea, in the
+attempt to reach the East by the way of Nova Zembla, struck over to the
+coast of America in a high northern latitude. He then stretched down
+southwardly to the entrance of Chesapeake Bay (of which he had gained a
+knowledge from the charts and descriptions of his friend, Captain
+Smith), thence returning to the north, entered Delaware Bay, standing
+out again to sea, arrived on the second of September in sight of the
+"high hills" of Neversink, pronouncing it "a good land to fall in with,
+and a pleasant land to see;" and, on the following morning, sending his
+boat before him to sound the way, passed Sandy Hook, and there came to
+anchor on the third of September, 1609; two hundred and forty-seven
+years ago next Wednesday. What an event, my friends, in the history of
+American population, enterprise, commerce, intelligence, and power--the
+dropping of that anchor at Sandy Hook!
+
+
+                     DISCOVERY OF THE HUDSON RIVER.
+
+Here he lingered a week, in friendly intercourse with the natives of New
+Jersey, while a boat's company explored the waters up to Newark Bay. And
+now the great question. Shall he turn back, like Verazzano, or ascend
+the stream? Hudson was of a race not prone to turn back, by sea or by
+land. On the eleventh of September he raised the anchor of the _Half
+Moon_, passed through the Narrows, beholding on both sides "as beautiful
+a land as one can tread on;" and floated cautiously and slowly up the
+noble stream--the first ship that ever rested on its bosom. He passed
+the Palisades, nature's dark basaltic Malakoff, forced the iron gateway
+of the Highlands, anchored, on the fourteenth, near West Point; swept
+onward and upward, the following day, by grassy meadows and tangled
+slopes, hereafter to be covered with smiling villages;--by elevated
+banks and woody heights, the destined site of towns and cities--of
+Newburg, Poughkeepsie, Catskill;--on the evening of the fifteenth
+arrived opposite "the mountains which lie from the river side," where he
+found "a very loving people and very old men;" and the day following
+sailed by the spot hereafter to be honored by his own illustrious name.
+One more day wafts him up between Schodac and Castleton; and here he
+landed and passed a day with the natives,--greeted with all sorts of
+barbarous hospitality,--the land "the finest for cultivation he ever set
+foot on," the natives so kind and gentle, that when they found he would
+not remain with them over night, and feared that he left them--poor
+children of nature!--because he was afraid of their weapons,--he, whose
+quarter-deck was heavy with ordnance,--they "broke their arrows in
+pieces, and threw them in the fire." On the following morning, with the
+early flood-tide, on the 19th of September, 1609, the _Half Moon_ "ran
+higher up, two leagues above the Shoals," and came to anchor in deep
+water, near the site of the present city of Albany. Happy if he could
+have closed his gallant career on the banks of the stream which so
+justly bears his name, and thus have escaped the sorrowful and
+mysterious catastrophe which awaited him the next year!
+
+
+            CHAMPLAIN'S VOYAGE AND THE GROWTH OF COLONIES.
+
+But the discovery of your great river and of the site of your ancient
+city, is not the only event which renders the year 1609 memorable in the
+annals of America and the world. It was one of those years in which a
+sort of sympathetic movement toward great results unconsciously pervades
+the races and the minds of men. While Hudson discovered this mighty
+river and this vast region for the Dutch East India Company, Champlain,
+in the same year, carried the lilies of France to the beautiful lake
+which bears his name on your northern limits; the languishing
+establishments of England in Virginia were strengthened by the second
+charter granted to that colony; the little church of Robinson removed
+from Amsterdam to Leyden, from which, in a few years, they went forth,
+to lay the foundations of New England on Plymouth Rock; the seven United
+Provinces of the Netherlands, after that terrific struggle of forty
+years (the commencement of which has just been embalmed in a record
+worthy of the great event by an American historian) wrested from Spain
+the virtual acknowledgment of their independence, in the Twelve Years'
+Truce; and James the First, in the same year, granted to the British
+East India Company their first permanent charter,--corner-stone of an
+empire destined in two centuries to overshadow the East.
+
+
+                         GALILEO'S DISCOVERIES
+
+One more incident is wanting to complete the list of the memorable
+occurrences which signalize the year 1609, and one most worthy to be
+remembered by us on this occasion. Cotemporaneously with the events
+which I have enumerated--eras of history, dates of empire, the
+starting-point in some of the greatest political, social, and moral
+revolutions in our annals, an Italian astronomer, who had heard of the
+magnifying glasses which had been made in Holland, by which distant
+objects could be brought seemingly near, caught at the idea, constructed
+a telescope, and pointed it to the heavens. Yes, my friends, in the same
+year in which Hudson discovered your river and the site of your ancient
+town, in which Robinson made his melancholy hegira from Amsterdam to
+Leyden, Galileo Galilei, with a telescope, the work of his own hands,
+discovered the phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter; and now,
+after the lapse of less than two centuries and a half, on a spot then
+embosomed in the wilderness--the covert of the least civilized of all
+the races of men--we are assembled--descendants of the Hollanders,
+descendants of the Pilgrims, in this ancient and prosperous city, to
+inaugurate the establishment of a first-class Astronomical Observatory.
+
+
+                         EARLY DAYS OF ALBANY.
+
+One more glance at your early history. Three years after the landing of
+the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Fort Orange was erected, in the center of what
+is now the business part of the city of Albany; and, a few years later,
+the little hamlet of Beverswyck began to nestle under its walls. Two
+centuries ago, my Albanian friends, this very year, and I believe this
+very month of August, your forefathers assembled, not to inaugurate an
+observatory, but to lay the foundations of a new church, in the place of
+the rude cabin which had hitherto served them in that capacity. It was
+built at the intersection of Yonker's and Handelaar's, better known to
+you as State and Market streets. Public and private liberality
+cooperated in the important work. The authorities at the Fort gave
+fifteen hundred guilders; the patroon of that early day, with the
+liberality coeval with the name and the race, contributed a thousand;
+while the inhabitants, for whose benefit it was erected, whose numbers
+were small and their resources smaller, contributed twenty beavers "for
+the purchase of an oaken pulpit in Holland." Whether the largest part of
+this subscription was bestowed by some liberal benefactress, tradition
+has not informed us.
+
+
+                             NEW AMSTERDAM
+
+Nor is the year 1656 memorable in the annals of Albany alone. In that
+same year your imperial metropolis, then numbering about three hundred
+inhabitants, was first laid out as a city, by the name of New
+Amsterdam.[A] In eight years more, New Netherland becomes New York; Fort
+Orange and its dependent hamlet assumes the name of Albany. A century of
+various fortune succeeds; the scourge of French and Indian war is rarely
+absent from the land; every shock of European policy vibrates with
+electric rapidity across the Atlantic; but the year 1756 finds a
+population of 300,000 in your growing province. Albany, however, may
+still be regarded almost as a frontier settlement. Of the twelve
+counties into which the province was divided a hundred years ago, the
+county of Albany comprehended all that lay north and west of the city;
+and the city itself contained but about three hundred and fifty houses.
+
+[Footnote A: These historical notices are, for the most part, abridged
+from Mr. Brodhead's excellent history of New York.]
+
+
+                           TWO HUNDRED YEARS.
+
+One more century; another act in the great drama of empire; another
+French and Indian War beneath the banners of England; a successful
+Revolution, of which some of the most momentous events occurred within
+your limits; a union of States; a Constitution of Federal Government;
+your population carried to the St. Lawrence and the great Lakes, and
+their waters poured into the Hudson; your territory covered with a
+net-work of canals and railroads, filled with life and action, and
+power, with all the works of peaceful art and prosperous enterprise with
+all the institutions which constitute and advance the civilization of
+the age; its population exceeding that of the Union at the date of the
+Revolution; your own numbers twice as large as those of the largest city
+of that day, you have met together, my Friends, just two hundred years
+since the erection of the little church of Beverswyck, to dedicate a
+noble temple of science and to take a becoming public notice of the
+establishment of an institution, destined, as we trust, to exert a
+beneficial influence on the progress of useful knowledge at home and
+abroad, and through that on the general cause of civilization.
+
+
+                          SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS.
+
+You will observe that I am careful to say the progress of science "at
+home and abroad;" for the study of Astronomy in this country has long
+since, I am happy to add, passed that point where it is content to
+repeat the observations and verify the results of European research. It
+has boldly and successfully entered the field of original investigation,
+discovery, and speculation; and there is not now a single department of
+the science in which the names of American observers and mathematicians
+are not cited by our brethren across the water, side by side with the
+most eminent of their European contemporaries.
+
+This state of things is certainly recent. During the colonial period and
+in the first generation after the Revolution, no department of science
+was, for obvious causes, very extensively cultivated in
+America--astronomy perhaps as much as the kindred branches. The
+improvement in the quadrant, commonly known as Hadley's, had already
+been made at Philadelphia by Godfrey, in the early part of the last
+century; and the beautiful invention of the collimating telescope was
+made at a later period by Rittenhouse, an astronomer of distinguished
+repute. The transits of Venus of 1761 and 1769 were observed, and
+orreries were constructed in different parts of the country; and some
+respectable scientific essays are contained and valuable observations
+are recorded in the early volumes of the Transactions of the
+Philosophical Society, at Philadelphia, and the American Academy of Arts
+and Sciences at Boston and Cambridge. But in the absence of a numerous
+class of men of science to encourage and aid each other, without
+observatories and without valuable instruments, little of importance
+could be expected in the higher walks of astronomical life.
+
+
+                         AMERICAN OBSERVATIONS.
+
+The greater the credit due for the achievement of an enterprise
+commenced in the early part of the present century, and which would
+reflect honor on the science of any country and any age; I mean the
+translation and commentary on Laplace's _Mecanique Celeste_, by
+Bowditch; a work of whose merit I am myself wholly unable to form an
+opinion, but which I suppose places the learned translator and
+commentator on a level with the ablest astronomers and geometers of the
+day. This work may be considered as opening a new era in the history of
+American science. The country was still almost wholly deficient in
+instrumental power; but the want was generally felt by men of science,
+and the public mind in various parts of the country began to be turned
+towards the means of supplying it. In 1825, President John Quincy Adams
+brought the subject of a National Observatory before Congress. Political
+considerations prevented its being favorably entertained at that time;
+and it was not till 1842, and as an incident of the exploring
+expedition, that an appropriation was made for a depot for the charts
+and instruments of the Navy. On this modest basis has been reared the
+National Observatory at Washington; an institution which has already
+taken and fully sustains an honorable position among the scientific
+establishments of the age.
+
+Besides the institution at Washington, fifteen or twenty observatories
+have within the last few years, been established in different parts of
+the country, some of them on a modest scale, for the gratification of
+the scientific taste and zeal of individuals, others on a broad
+foundation of expense and usefulness. In these establishments, public
+and private, the means are provided for the highest order of
+astronomical observation, research, and instruction. There is already in
+the country an amount of instrumental power (to which addition is
+constantly making), and of mathematical skill on the part of our men of
+science, adequate to a manly competition with their European
+contemporaries. The fruits are already before the world, in the
+triangulation of several of the States, in the great work of the Coast
+Survey, in the numerous scientific surveys of the interior of the
+Continent, in the astronomical department of the Exploring Expedition,
+in the scientific expedition to Chili, in the brilliant hydrographical
+labors of the Observatory at Washington, in the published observations
+of Washington and Cambridge, in the Journal conducted by the Nestor of
+American Science, now in its eighth lustrum; in the _Sidereal
+Messenger_, the _Astronomical Journal_, and the _National Ephemeris_; in
+the great chronometrical expeditions to determine the longitude of
+Cambridge, better ascertained than that of Paris was till within the
+last year; in the prompt rectification of the errors in the predicted
+elements of Neptune; in its identification with Lalande's missing star,
+and in the calculation of its ephemeris; in the discovery of the
+satellite of Neptune, of the eighth satellite of Saturn, and of the
+innermost of its rings; in the establishment, both by observation and
+theory, of the non-solid character of Saturn's rings; in the separation
+and measurement of many double and triple stars, amenable only to
+superior instrumental power, in the immense labor already performed in
+preparing star catalogues, and in numerous accurate observations of
+standard stars; in the diligent and successful observation of the
+meteoric showers; in an extensive series of magnetic observations; in
+the discovery of an asteroid and ten or twelve telescopic comets; in the
+resolution of nebulae which had defied every thing in Europe but Lord
+Rosse's great reflector; in the application of electricity to the
+measurement of differences in longitude; in the ascertainment of the
+velocity of the electro-magnetic fluid, and its truly wonderful uses in
+recording astronomical observations. These are but a portion of the
+achievements of American astronomical science within fifteen or twenty
+years, and fully justify the most sanguine anticipations of its further
+progress.
+
+How far our astronomers may be able to pursue their researches, will
+depend upon the resources of our public institutions, and the liberality
+of wealthy individuals in furnishing the requisite means. With the
+exception of the observatories at Washington and West Point, little can
+be done, or be expected to be done, by the government of the Union or
+the States; but in this, as in every other department of liberal art and
+science, the great dependence,--and may I not add, the safe
+dependence?--as it ever has been, must continue to be upon the bounty of
+enlightened, liberal, and public-spirited individuals.
+
+
+                         THE DUDLEY OBSERVATORY.
+
+It is by a signal exercise of this bounty, my Friends, that we are
+called together to-day. The munificence of several citizens of this
+ancient city, among whom the first place is due to the generous lady
+whose name has with great propriety been given to the institution, has
+furnished the means for the foundation of the Dudley Observatory at
+Albany. On a commanding elevation on the northern edge of the city,
+liberally given for that purpose by the head of a family in which the
+patronage of science is hereditary, a building of ample dimensions has
+been erected, upon a plan which combines all the requisites of solidity,
+convenience, and taste. A large portion of the expense of the structure
+has been defrayed by Mrs. Blandina Dudley; to whose generosity, and that
+of several other public-spirited individuals, the institution is also
+indebted for the provision which has been made for an adequate supply of
+first-class instruments, to be executed by the most eminent makers in
+Europe and America; and which, it is confidently expected, will yield to
+none of their class in any observatory in the world.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: Prof. Loomis, in _Harper's Magazine_ for June, p. 49.]
+
+With a liberal supply of instrumental power; established in a community
+to whose intelligence and generosity its support may be safely confided,
+and whose educational institutions are rapidly realizing the conception
+of a university; countenanced by the gentleman who conducts the United
+States Coast Survey with such scientific skill and administrative
+energy; committed to the immediate supervision of an astronomer to whose
+distinguished talent had been added the advantage of a thorough
+scientific education in the most renowned universities of Europe, and
+who, as the editor of the _American Astronomical Journal_, has shown
+himself to be fully qualified for the high trust;--under these favorable
+circumstances, the Dudley Observatory at Albany takes its place among
+the scientific foundations of the country and the world.
+
+
+                          WONDERS OF ASTRONOMY.
+
+It is no affected modesty which leads me to express the regret that this
+interesting occasion could not have taken place under somewhat different
+auspices. I feel that the duty of addressing this great and enlightened
+assembly, comprising so much of the intelligence of the community and of
+the science of the country, ought to have been elsewhere assigned; that
+it should have devolved upon some one of the eminent persons, many of
+whom I see before me, to whom you have been listening the past week,
+who, as observers and geometers, could have treated the subject with a
+master's power; astronomers, whose telescopes have penetrated the depths
+of the heavens, or mathematicians, whose analysis unthreads the maze of
+their wondrous mechanism. If, instead of commanding, as you easily could
+have done, qualifications of this kind, your choice has rather fallen on
+one making no pretensions to the honorable name of a man of
+science,--but whose delight it has always been to turn aside from the
+dusty paths of active life, for an interval of recreation in the green
+fields of sacred nature in all her kingdoms,--it is, I presume, because
+you have desired on an occasion of this kind, necessarily of a popular
+character, that those views of the subject should be presented which
+address themselves to the general intelligence of the community, and not
+to its select scientific circles. There is, perhaps, no branch of
+science which to the same extent as astronomy exhibits phenomena which,
+while they task the highest powers of philosophical research, are also
+well adapted to arrest the attention of minds barely tinctured with
+scientific culture, and even to teach the sensibilities of the wholly
+uninstructed observer. The profound investigations of the chemist into
+the ultimate constitution of material nature, the minute researches of
+the physiologist into the secrets of animal life, the transcendental
+logic of the geometer, clothed in a notation, the very sight of which
+terrifies the uninitiated,--are lost on the common understanding. But
+the unspeakable glories of the rising and the setting sun; the serene
+majesty of the moon, as she walks in full-orbed brightness through the
+heavens; the soft witchery of the morning and the evening star; the
+imperial splendors of the firmament on a bright, unclouded night; the
+comet, whose streaming banner floats over half the sky,--these are
+objects which charm and astonish alike the philosopher and the peasant,
+the mathematician who weighs the masses and defines the orbits of the
+heavenly bodies, and the untutored observer who sees nothing beyond the
+images painted upon the eye.
+
+
+                  WHAT IS AN ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORY?
+
+An astronomical observatory, in the general acceptation of the word, is
+a building erected for the reception and appropriate use of astronomical
+instruments, and the accommodation of the men of science employed in
+making and reducing observations of the heavenly bodies. These
+instruments are mainly of three classes, to which I believe all others
+of a strictly astronomical character may be referred.
+
+1. The instruments by which the heavens are inspected, with a view to
+discover the existence of those celestial bodies which are not visible
+to the naked eye (beyond all comparison more numerous than those which
+are), and the magnitude, shapes, and other sensible qualities, both of
+those which are and those which are not thus visible to the unaided
+sight. The instruments of this class are designated by the general name
+of Telescope, and are of two kinds,--the refracting telescope, which
+derives its magnifying power from a system of convex lenses; and the
+reflecting telescope, which receives the image of the heavenly body upon
+a concave mirror.
+
+2d. The second class of instruments consists of those which are designed
+principally to measure the angular distances of the heavenly bodies from
+each other, and their time of passing the meridian. The transit
+instrument, the meridian circle, the mural circle, the heliometer, and
+the sextant, belong to this class. The brilliant discoveries of
+astronomy are, for the most part, made with the first class of
+instruments; its practical results wrought out by the second.
+
+3d. The third class contains the clock, with its subsidiary apparatus,
+for measuring the time and making its subdivisions with the greatest
+possible accuracy; indispensable auxiliary of all the instruments, by
+which the positions and motions of the heavenly bodies are observed, and
+measured, and recorded.
+
+
+                            THE TELESCOPE.
+
+The telescope may be likened to a wondrous cyclopean eye, endued with
+superhuman power, by which the astronomer extends the reach of his
+vision to the further heavens, and surveys galaxies and universes
+compared with which the solar system is but an atom floating in the air.
+The transit may be compared to the measuring rod which he lays from
+planet to planet, and from star to star, to ascertain and mark off the
+heavenly spaces, and transfer them to his note-book; the clock is that
+marvelous apparatus by which he equalizes and divides into nicely
+measured parts a portion of that unconceived infinity of duration,
+without beginning and without end, in which all existence floats as on a
+shoreless and bottomless sea.
+
+In the contrivance and the execution of these instruments, the utmost
+stretch of inventive skill and mechanical ingenuity has been put forth.
+To such perfection have they been carried, that a single second of
+magnitude or space is rendered a distinctly visible and appreciable
+quantity. "The arc of a circle," says Sir J. Herschell, "subtended by
+one second, is less than the 200,000th part of the radius, so that on a
+circle of six feet in diameter, it would occupy no greater linear extent
+than 1-5700 part of an inch, a quantity requiring a powerful microscope
+to be discerned at all."[A] The largest body in our system, the sun,
+whose real diameter is 882,000 miles, subtends, at a distance of
+95,000,000 miles, but an angle of little more than 32; while so
+admirably are the best instruments constructed, that both in Europe and
+America a satellite of Neptune, an object of comparatively
+inconsiderable diameter, has been discovered at a distance of 2,850
+millions of miles.
+
+[Footnote A: _Outlines_, section 131.]
+
+
+                 UTILITY OF ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATIONS.
+
+The object of an observatory, erected and supplied with instruments of
+this admirable construction, and at proportionate expense, is, as I have
+already intimated, to provide for an accurate and systematic survey of
+the heavenly bodies, with a view to a more correct and extensive
+acquaintance with those already known, and as instrumental power and
+skill in using it increase, to the discovery of bodies hitherto
+invisible, and in both classes to the determination of their distances,
+their relations to each other, and the laws which govern their
+movements.
+
+Why should we wish to obtain this knowledge? What inducement is there to
+expend large sums of money in the erection of observatories, and in
+furnishing them with costly instruments, and in the support of the men
+of science employed in making, discussing, and recording, for successive
+generations, those minute observations of the heavenly bodies?
+
+In an exclusively scientific treatment of this subject, an inquiry into
+its utilitarian relations would be superfluous--even wearisome. But on
+an occasion like the present, you will not, perhaps, think it out of
+place if I briefly answer the question, What is the use of an
+observatory, and what benefit may be expected from the operations of
+such an establishment in a community like ours?
+
+1. In the first place, then, we derive from the observations of the
+heavenly bodies which are made at an observatory, our only adequate
+measures of time, and our only means of comparing the time of one place
+with the time of another. Our artificial time-keepers--clocks, watches,
+and chronometers--however ingeniously contrived and admirably
+fabricated, are but a transcript, so to say, of the celestial motions,
+and would be of no value without the means of regulating them by
+observation. It is impossible for them, under any circumstances, to
+escape the imperfection of all machinery the work of human hands; and
+the moment we remove with our time-keeper east or west, it fails us. It
+will keep home time alone, like the fond traveler who leaves his heart
+behind him. The artificial instrument is of incalculable utility, but
+must itself be regulated by the eternal clock-work of the skies.
+
+
+         RELATIONS BETWEEN NATURAL PHENOMENA AND DAILY LIFE.
+
+This single consideration is sufficient to show how completely the daily
+business of life is affected and controlled by the heavenly bodies. It
+is they--and not our main-springs, our expansion balances, and our
+compensation pendulums--which give us our time. To reverse the line of
+Pope:
+
+            "'Tis with our watches as our judgments;--none
+              Go just alike, but each believes his own."
+
+But for all the kindreds and tribes and tongues of men--each upon their
+own meridian--from the Arctic pole to the equator, from the equator to
+the Antarctic pole, the eternal sun strikes twelve at noon, and the
+glorious constellations, far up in the everlasting belfries of the
+skies, chime twelve at midnight;--twelve for the pale student over his
+flickering lamp; twelve amid the flaming glories of Orion's belt, if he
+crosses the meridian at that fated hour; twelve by the weary couch of
+languishing humanity; twelve in the star-paved courts of the Empyrean;
+twelve for the heaving tides of the ocean; twelve for the weary arm of
+labor; twelve for the toiling brain; twelve for the watching, waking,
+broken heart; twelve for the meteor which blazes for a moment and
+expires; twelve for the comet whose period is measured by centuries;
+twelve for every substantial, for every imaginary thing, which exists in
+the sense, the intellect, or the fancy, and which the speech or thought
+of man, at the given meridian, refers to the lapse of time.
+
+Not only do we resort to the observation of the heavenly bodies for the
+means of regulating and rectifying our clocks, but the great divisions
+of day and month and year are derived from the same source. By the
+constitution of our nature, the elements of our existence are closely
+connected with celestial times. Partly by his physical organization,
+partly by the experience of the race from the dawn of creation, man as
+he is, and the times and seasons of the heavenly bodies, are part and
+parcel of one system. The first great division of time, the day-night
+(nychthemerum), for which we have no precise synonym in our language,
+with its primal alternation of waking and sleeping, of labor and rest,
+is a vital condition of the existence of such a creature as man. The
+revolution of the year, with its various incidents of summer and winter,
+and seed-time and harvest, is not less involved in our social, material,
+and moral progress. It is true that at the poles, and on the equator,
+the effects of these revolutions are variously modified or wholly
+disappear; but as the necessary consequence, human life is extinguished
+at the poles, and on the equator attains only a languid or feverish
+development. Those latitudes only in which the great motions and
+cardinal positions of the earth exert a mean influence, exhibit man in
+the harmonious expansion of his powers. The lunar period, which lies at
+the foundation of the _month_, is less vitally connected with human
+existence and development; but is proved by the experience of every age
+and race to be eminently conducive to the progress of civilization and
+culture.
+
+But indispensable as are these heavenly measures of time to our life and
+progress, and obvious as are the phenomena on which they rest, yet owing
+to the circumstance that, in the economy of nature, the day, the month,
+and the year are not exactly commensurable, some of the most difficult
+questions in practical astronomy are those by which an accurate division
+of time, applicable to the various uses of life, is derived from the
+observation of the heavenly bodies. I have no doubt that, to the Supreme
+Intelligence which created and rules the universe, there is a harmony
+hidden to us in the numerical relation to each other of days, months,
+and years; but in our ignorance of that harmony, their practical
+adjustment to each other is a work of difficulty. The great
+embarrassment which attended the reformation of the calendar, after the
+error of the Julian period had, in the lapse of centuries, reached ten
+(or rather twelve) days, sufficiently illustrates this remark. It is
+most true that scientific difficulties did not form the chief obstacle.
+Having been proposed under the auspices of the Roman pontiff, the
+Protestant world, for a century and more, rejected the new style. It was
+in various places the subject of controversy, collision, and
+bloodshed.[A] It was not adopted in England till nearly two centuries
+after its introduction at Rome; and in the country of Struve and the
+Pulkova equatorial, they persist at the present day in adding eleven
+minutes and twelve seconds to the length of the tropical year.
+
+[Footnote A: Stern's "_Himmelskunde_," p. 72.]
+
+
+                         GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE.
+
+2. The second great practical use of an Astronomical Observatory is
+connected with the science of geography. The first page of the history
+of our Continent declares this truth. Profound meditation on the
+sphericity of the earth was one of the main reasons which led Columbus
+to undertake his momentous voyage; and his thorough acquaintance with
+the astronomical science of that day was, in his own judgment, what
+enabled him to overcome the almost innumerable obstacles which attended
+its prosecution.[A] In return, I find that Copernicus in the very
+commencement of his immortal work _De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium_,
+fol. 2, appeals to the discovery of America as completing the
+demonstration of the sphericity of the earth. Much of our knowledge of
+the figure, size, density, and position of the earth, as a member of the
+solar system, is derived from this science; and it furnishes us the
+means of performing the most important operations of practical
+geography. Latitude and longitude, which lie at the basis of all
+descriptive geography, are determined by observation. No map deserves
+the name, on which the position of important points has not been
+astronomically determined. Some even of our most important political and
+administrative arrangements depend upon the cooperation of this science.
+Among these I may mention the land system of the United States, and the
+determination of the boundaries of the country. I believe that till it
+was done by the Federal Government, a uniform system of mathematical
+survey had never in any country been applied to an extensive territory.
+Large grants and sales of public land took place before the Revolution,
+and in the interval between the peace and the adoption of the
+Constitution; but the limits of these grants and sales were ascertained
+by sensible objects, by trees, streams, rocks, hills, and by reference
+to adjacent portions of territory, previously surveyed. The uncertainty
+of boundaries thus defined, was a never-failing source of litigation.
+Large tracts of land in the Western country, granted by Virginia under
+this old system of special and local survey, were covered with
+conflicting claims; and the controversies to which they gave rise formed
+no small part of the business of the Federal Court after its
+organization. But the adoption of the present land-system brought order
+out of chaos. The entire public domain is now scientifically surveyed
+before it is offered for sale; it is laid off into ranges, townships,
+sections, and smaller divisions, with unerring accuracy, resting on the
+foundation of base and meridian lines; and I have been informed that
+under this system, scarce a case of contested location and boundary has
+ever presented itself in court. The General Land Office contains maps
+and plans, in which every quarter-section of the public land is laid
+down with mathematical precision. The superficies of half a continent is
+thus transferred in miniature to the bureaus of Washington; while the
+local Land Offices contain transcripts of these plans, copies of which
+are furnished to the individual purchaser. When we consider the tide of
+population annually flowing into the public domain, and the immense
+importance of its efficient and economical administration, the utility
+of this application of Astronomy will be duly estimated.
+
+[Footnote A: Humboldt, _Histotre de la Geographie_, &c., Tom. 1,
+page 71.]
+
+I will here venture to repeat an anecdote, which I heard lately from a
+son of the late Hon. Timothy Pickering. Mr. Octavius Pickering, on
+behalf of his father, had applied to Mr. David Putnam of Marietta, to
+act as his legal adviser, with respect to certain land claims in the
+Virginia Military district, in the State of Ohio. Mr. Putnam declined
+the agency. He had had much to do with business of that kind, and found
+it beset with endless litigation. "I have never," he added, "succeeded
+but in a single case, and that was a location and survey made by General
+Washington before the Revolution; and I am not acquainted with any
+surveys, except those made by him, but what have been litigated."
+
+At this moment, a most important survey of the coast of the United
+States is in progress, an operation of the utmost consequence, in
+reference to the commerce, navigation, and hydrography of the country.
+The entire work, I need scarce say, is one of practical astronomy. The
+scientific establishment which we this day inaugurate is looked to for
+important cooperation in this great undertaking, and will no doubt
+contribute efficiently to its prosecution.
+
+Astronomical observation furnishes by far the best means of defining the
+boundaries of States, especially when the lines are of great length and
+run through unsettled countries. Natural indications, like rivers and
+mountains, however indistinct in appearance, are in practice subject to
+unavoidable error. By the treaty of 1783, a boundary was established
+between the United States and Great Britain, depending chiefly on the
+course of rivers and highlands dividing the waters which flow into the
+Atlantic Ocean from those which flow into the St. Lawrence. It took
+twenty years to find out which river was the true St. Croix, that being
+the starting point. England then having made the extraordinary discovery
+that the Bay of Fundy is not a part of the Atlantic Ocean, forty years
+more were passed in the unsuccessful attempt to re-create the highlands
+which this strange theory had annihilated; and just as the two countries
+were on the verge of a war, the controversy was settled by compromise.
+Had the boundary been accurately described by lines of latitude and
+longitude, no dispute could have arisen. No dispute arose as to the
+boundary between the United States and Spain, and her successor, Mexico,
+where it runs through untrodden deserts and over pathless mountains
+along the 42d degree of latitude. The identity of rivers may be
+disputed, as in the case of the St. Croix; the course of mountain chains
+is too broad for a dividing line; the division of streams, as experience
+has shown, is uncertain; but a degree of latitude is written on the
+heavenly sphere, and nothing but an observation is required to read the
+record.
+
+
+                         QUESTIONS OF BOUNDARY.
+
+But scientific elements, like sharp instruments, must be handled with
+scientific accuracy. A part of our boundary between the British
+Provinces ran upon the forty-fifth degree of latitude; and about forty
+years ago, an expensive fortress was commenced by the government of the
+United States, at Rouse's Point, on Lake Champlain, on a spot intended
+to be just within our limits. When a line came to be more carefully
+surveyed, the fortress turned out to be on the wrong side of the line;
+we had been building an expensive fortification for our neighbor. But in
+the general compromises of the Treaty of Washington by the Webster and
+Ashburton Treaty in 1842, the fortification was left within our
+limits.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: Webster's Works. Vol. V., 110, 115.]
+
+Errors still more serious had nearly resulted, a few years since, in a
+war with Mexico. By the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, the
+boundary line between the United States and that country was in part
+described by reference to the town of El Paso, as laid down on a
+specified map of the United States, of which a copy was appended to the
+treaty. This boundary was to be surveyed and run by a joint commission
+of men of science. It soon appeared that errors of two or three degrees
+existed in the projection of the map. Its lines of latitude and
+longitude did not conform to the topography of the region; so that it
+became impossible to execute the text of the treaty. The famous Mesilla
+Valley was a part of the debatable ground; and the sum of $10,000,000,
+paid to the Mexican Government for that and for an additional strip of
+territory on the southwest, was the smart-money which expiated the
+inaccuracy of the map--the necessary result, perhaps, of the want of
+good materials for its construction.
+
+It became my official duty in London, a few years ago, to apply to the
+British Government for an authentic statement of their claim to
+jurisdiction over New Zealand. The official _Gazette_ for the 2d of
+October, 1840, was sent me from the Foreign Office, as affording the
+desired information. This number of the _Gazette_ contained the
+proclamations issued by the Lieutenant Governor of New Zealand, "in
+pursuance of the instructions he received from the Marquis of Normanby,
+one of Her Majesty's principal Secretaries of State," asserting the
+jurisdiction of his government over the islands of New Zealand, and
+declaring them to extend "from 34 degrees 30 minutes North to 47 degrees
+10 minutes South latitude." It is scarcely necessary to say that south
+latitude was intended in both instances. This error of 69 degrees of
+latitude, which would have extended the claim of British jurisdiction
+over the whole breadth of the Pacific, had, apparently, escaped the
+notice of that government.
+
+
+                        COMMERCE AND NAVIGATION.
+
+It would be easy to multiply illustrations in proof of the great
+practical importance of accurate scientific designations, drawn from
+astronomical observations, in various relations connected with
+boundaries, surveys, and other geographical purposes; but I must hasten
+to
+
+3. A third important department, in which the services rendered by
+astronomy are equally conspicuous. I refer to commerce and navigation.
+It is mainly owing to the results of astronomical observation, that
+modern commerce has attained such a vast expansion, compared with that
+of the ancient world. I have already reminded you that accurate ideas in
+this respect contributed materially to the conception in the mind of
+Columbus of his immortal enterprise, and to the practical success with
+which it was conducted. It was mainly his skill in the use of
+astronomical instruments--imperfect as they were--which enabled him, in
+spite of the bewildering variation of the compass, to find his way
+across the ocean.
+
+With the progress of the true system of the universe toward general
+adoption, the problem of finding the longitude at sea presented itself.
+This was the avowed object of the foundation of the observatory at
+Greenwich;[A] and no one subject has received more of the attention of
+astronomers, than those investigations of the lunar theory on which the
+requisite tables of the navigator are founded. The pathways of the ocean
+are marked out in the sky above. The eternal lights of the heavens are
+the only Pharos whose beams never fail, which no tempest can shake from
+its foundation. Within my recollection, it was deemed a necessary
+qualification for the master and the mate of a merchant-ship, and even
+for a prime hand, to be able to "work a lunar," as it was called. The
+improvements in the chronometer have in practice, to a great extent,
+superseded this laborious operation; but observation remains, and
+unquestionably will for ever remain, the only dependence for
+ascertaining the ship's time and deducting the longitude from the
+comparison of that time with the chronometer.
+
+[Footnote A: Grant's _Physical Astronomy_, p. 460.]
+
+It may, perhaps, be thought that astronomical science is brought already
+to such a state of perfection that nothing more is to be desired, or at
+least that nothing more is attainable, in reference to such practicable
+applications as I have described. This, however, is an idea which
+generous minds will reject, in this, as in every other department of
+human knowledge. In astronomy, as in every thing else, the discoveries
+already made, theoretical or practical, instead of exhausting the
+science, or putting a limit to its advancement, do but furnish the means
+and instruments of further progress. I have no doubt we live on the
+verge of discoveries and inventions, in every department, as brilliant
+as any that have ever been made; that there are new truths, new facts,
+ready to start into recognition on every side; and it seems to me there
+never was an age, since the dawn of time, when men ought to be less
+disposed to rest satisfied with the progress already made, than the age
+in which we live; for there never was an age more distinguished for
+ingenious research, for novel result, and bold generalization.
+
+That no further improvement is desirable in the means and methods of
+ascertaining the ship's place at sea, no one I think will from
+experience be disposed to assert. The last time I crossed the Atlantic,
+I walked the quarter-deck with the officer in charge of the noble
+vessel, on one occasion, when we were driving along before a leading
+breeze and under a head of steam, beneath a starless sky at midnight, at
+the rate certainly of ten or eleven miles an hour. There is something
+sublime, but approaching the terrible, in such a scene;--the rayless
+gloom, the midnight chill,--the awful swell of the deep,--the dismal
+moan of the wind through the rigging, the all but volcanic fires within
+the hold of the ship. I scarce know an occasion in ordinary life in
+which a reflecting mind feels more keenly its hopeless dependence on
+irrational forces beyond its own control. I asked my companion how
+nearly he could determine his ship's place at sea under favorable
+circumstances. Theoretically, he answered, I think, within a
+mile;--practically and usually within three or four. My next question
+was, how near do you think we may be to Cape Race;--that dangerous
+headland which pushes its iron-bound unlighted bastions from the shore
+of Newfoundland far into the Atlantic,--first landfall to the
+homeward-bound American vessel. We must, said he, by our last
+observations and reckoning, be within three or four miles of Cape Race.
+A comparison of these two remarks, under the circumstances in which we
+were placed at the moment, brought my mind to the conclusion, that it is
+greatly to be wished that the means should be discovered of finding the
+ship's place more accurately, or that navigators would give Cape Race a
+little wider berth. But I do not remember that one of the steam packets
+between England and America was ever lost on that formidable point.
+
+It appears to me by no means unlikely that, with the improvement of
+instrumental power, and of the means of ascertaining the ship's time
+with exactness, as great an advance beyond the present state of art and
+science in finding a ship's place at sea may take place, as was effected
+by the invention of the reflecting quadrant, the calculation of lunar
+tables, and the improved construction of chronometers.
+
+
+                      BABBAGE'S DIFFERENCE MACHINE.
+
+In the wonderful versatility of the human mind, the improvement, when
+made, will very probably be made by paths where it is least expected.
+The great inducement to Mr. Babbage to attempt the construction of an
+engine by which astronomical tables could be calculated, and even
+printed, by mechanical means and with entire accuracy, was the errors in
+the requisite tables. Nineteen such errors, in point of fact, were
+discovered in an edition of Taylor's Logarithms printed in 1796; some of
+which might have led to the most dangerous results in calculating a
+ship's place. These nineteen errors, (of which one only was an error of
+the press), were pointed out in the _Nautical Almanac_ for 1832. In one
+of these _errata_ the seat of the error was stated to be in cosine of 14
+degrees 18 minutes 3 seconds. Subsequent examination showed that there
+was an error of one second in this correction; and, accordingly, in the
+_Nautical Almanac_ of the next year a new correction was necessary. But
+in making the new correction of one second, a new error was committed of
+ten degrees. Instead of cosine 14 degrees 18 minutes 2 seconds the
+correction was printed cosine 4 degrees 18 minutes 2 seconds making it
+still necessary, in some future edition of the _Nautical Almanac_, to
+insert an _erratum_ in an _erratum_ of the _errata_ in Taylor's
+logarithms.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: Edinburgh Review, Vol. LIX., 282.]
+
+In the hope of obviating the possibility of such errors, Mr. Babbage
+projected his calculating, or, as he prefers to call it, his difference
+machine. Although this extraordinary undertaking has been arrested, in
+consequence of the enormous expense attending its execution, enough has
+been achieved to show the mechanical possibility of constructing an
+engine of this kind, and even one of far higher powers, of which Mr.
+Babbage has matured the conception, devised the notation, and executed
+the drawings--themselves an imperishable monument of the genius of the
+author.
+
+I happened on one occasion to be in company with this highly
+distinguished man of science, whose social qualities are as pleasing as
+his constructive talent is marvelous, when another eminent _savant_,
+Count Strzelecki, just returned from his Oriental and Australian tour,
+observed that he found among the Chinese, a great desire to know
+something more of Mr. Babbage's calculating machine, and especially
+whether, like their own _swampan_, it could be made to go into the
+pocket. Mr. Babbage good-humouredly observed that, thus far, he had been
+very much out of pocket with it.
+
+
+               INCREASED COMMAND OF INSTRUMENTAL POWER.
+
+Whatever advances may be made in astronomical science, theoretical or
+applied, I am strongly inclined to think that they will be made in
+connection with an increased command of instrumental power. The natural
+order in which the human mind proceeds in the acquisition of
+astronomical knowledge is minute and accurate observation of the
+phenomena of the heavens, the skillful discussion and analysis of these
+observations, and sound philosophy in generalizing the results.
+
+In pursuing this course, however, a difficulty presented itself, which
+for ages proved insuperable--and which to the same extent has existed in
+no other science, viz.: that all the leading phenomena are in their
+appearance delusive. It is indeed true that in all sciences superficial
+observation can only lead, except by chance, to superficial knowledge;
+but I know of no branch in which, to the same degree as in astronomy,
+the great leading phenomena are the reverse of true; while they yet
+appeal so strongly to the senses, that men who could foretell eclipses,
+and who discovered the precession of the equinoxes, still believed that
+the earth was at rest in the center of the universe, and that all the
+host of heaven performed a daily revolution about it as a center.
+
+It usually happens in scientific progress, that when a great fact is at
+length discovered, it approves itself at once to all competent judges.
+It furnishes a solution to so many problems, and harmonizes with so many
+other facts,--that all the other _data_ as it were crystallize at once
+about it. In modern times, we have often witnessed such an impatience,
+so to say, of great truths, to be discovered, that it has frequently
+happened that they have been found out simultaneously by more than one
+individual; and a disputed question of priority is an event of very
+common occurrence. Not so with the true theory of the heavens. So
+complete is the deception practiced on the senses, that it failed more
+than once to yield to the suggestion of the truth; and it was only when
+the visual organs were armed with an almost preternatural instrumental
+power, that the great fact found admission to the human mind.
+
+
+                         THE COPERNICAN SYSTEM.
+
+It is supposed that in the very dawn of science, Pythagoras or his
+disciples explained the apparent motion of the heavenly bodies about the
+earth by the diurnal revolution of the earth on its axis. But this
+theory, though bearing so deeply impressed upon it the great seal of
+truth, _simplicity_, was in such glaring contrast with the evidence of
+the senses, that it failed of acceptance in antiquity or the middle
+ages. It found no favor with minds like those of Aristotle, Archimedes,
+Hipparchus, Ptolemy, or any of the acute and learned Arabian or mediaeval
+astronomers. All their ingenuity and all their mathematical skill were
+exhausted in the development of a wonderfully complicated and ingenious,
+but erroneous history. The great master truth, rejected for its
+simplicity, lay disregarded at their feet.
+
+At the second dawn of science, the great fact again beamed into the mind
+of Copernicus. Now, at least, in that glorious age which witnessed the
+invention of printing, the great mechanical engine of intellectual
+progress, and the discovery of America, we may expect that this
+long-hidden revelation, a second time proclaimed, will command the
+assent of mankind. But the sensible phenomena were still too strong for
+the theory; the glorious delusion of the rising and the setting sun
+could not be overcome. Tycho de Brahe furnished his Observatory with
+instruments superior in number and quality to all that had been
+collected before; but the great instrument of discovery, which, by
+augmenting the optic power of the eye, enables it to penetrate beyond
+the apparent phenomena, and to discern the true constitution of the
+heavenly bodies, was wanting at Uranienburg. The observations of Tycho
+as discussed by Kepler, conducted that most fervid, powerful, and
+sagacious mind to the discovery of some of the most important laws of
+the celestial motions; but it was not till Galileo, at Florence, had
+pointed his telescope to the sky, that the Copernican system could be
+said to be firmly established in the scientific world.
+
+
+                          THE HOME OF GALILEO.
+
+On this great name, my Friends, assembled as we are to dedicate a temple
+to instrumental Astronomy, we may well pause for a moment.
+
+There is much, in every way, in the city of Florence to excite the
+curiosity, to kindle the imagination, and to gratify the taste.
+Sheltered on the north by the vine-clad hills of Fiesoli, whose
+cyclopean walls carry back the antiquary to ages before the Roman,
+before the Etruscan power, the flowery city (Fiorenza) covers the sunny
+banks of the Arno with its stately palaces. Dark and frowning piles of
+mediaeval structure; a majestic dome, the prototype of St. Peter's;
+basilicas which enshrine the ashes of some of the mightiest of the dead;
+the stone where Dante stood to gaze on the Campanile; the house of
+Michael Angelo, still occupied by a descendant of his lineage and name,
+his hammer, his chisel, his dividers, his manuscript poems, all as if he
+had left them but yesterday; airy bridges, which seem not so much to
+rest on the earth as to hover over the waters they span; the loveliest
+creations of ancient art, rescued from the grave of ages again to
+enchant the world; the breathing marbles of Michael Angelo, the glowing
+canvas of Raphael and Titian, museums filled with medals and coins of
+every age from Cyrus the younger, and gems and amulets and vases from
+the sepulchers of Egyptian Pharaohs coeval with Joseph, and Etruscan
+Lucumons that swayed Italy before the Romans,--libraries stored with the
+choicest texts of ancient literature,--gardens of rose and orange, and
+pomegranate, and myrtle,--the very air you breathe languid with music
+and perfume;--such is Florence. But among all its fascinations,
+addressed to the sense, the memory, and the heart, there was none to
+which I more frequently gave a meditative hour during a year's
+residence, than to the spot where Galileo Galilei sleeps beneath the
+marble door of Santa Croce; no building on which I gazed with greater
+reverence, than I did upon the modest mansion at Arcetri, villa at once
+and prison, in which that venerable sage, by command of the Inquisition,
+passed the sad closing years of his life. The beloved daughter on whom
+he had depended to smooth his passage to the grave, laid there before
+him; the eyes with which he had discovered worlds before unknown,
+quenched in blindness:
+
+               Ahime! quegli occhi si son fatti oscuri,
+               Che vider piu di tutti i tempi antichi,
+               E luce fur dei secoli futuri.
+
+That was the house, "where," says Milton (another of those of whom the
+world was not worthy), "I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown
+old--a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking on astronomy otherwise
+than as the Dominican and Franciscan licensers thought."[A] Great
+Heavens! what a tribunal, what a culprit, what a crime! Let us thank
+God, my Friends, that we live in the nineteenth century. Of all the
+wonders of ancient and modern art, statues and paintings, and jewels and
+manuscripts,--the admiration and the delight of ages,--there was nothing
+which I beheld with more affectionate awe than that poor, rough tube, a
+few feet in length,--the work of his own hands,--that very "optic
+glass," through which the "Tuscan Artist" viewed the moon,
+
+              "At evening, from the top of Fesole,
+               Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
+               Rivers, or mountains, in her spotty globe."
+
+that poor little spy-glass (for it is scarcely more) through which the
+human eye first distinctly beheld the surface of the moon--first
+discovered the phases of Venus, the satellites of Jupiter, and the
+seeming handles of Saturn--first penetrated the dusky depths of the
+heavens--first pierced the clouds of visual error, which, from the
+creation of the world, involved the system of the Universe.
+
+[Footnote A: Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 213.]
+
+There are occasions in life in which a great mind lives years of rapt
+enjoyment in a moment. I can fancy the emotions of Galileo, when, first
+raising the newly-constructed telescope to the heavens, he saw fulfilled
+the grand prophecy of Copernicus, and beheld the planet Venus crescent
+like the moon. It was such another moment as that when the immortal
+printers of Mentz and Strasburg received the first copy of the Bible
+into their hands, the work of their divine art; like that when Columbus,
+through the gray dawn of the 12th of October, 1492 (Copernicus, at the
+age of eighteen, was then a student at Cracow), beheld the shores of San
+Salvador; like that when the law of gravitation first revealed itself to
+the intellect of Newton; like that when Franklin saw by the stiffening
+fibers of the hempen cord of his kite, that he held the lightning in his
+grasp; like that when Leverrier received back from Berlin the tidings
+that the predicted planet was found.
+
+Yes, noble Galileo, thou art right, _E pur si muove._ "It does move."
+Bigots may make thee recant it; but it moves, nevertheless. Yes, the
+earth moves, and the planets move, and the mighty waters move, and the
+great sweeping tides of air move, and the empires of men move, and the
+world of thought moves, ever onward and upward to higher facts and
+bolder theories. The Inquisition may seal thy lips, but they can no more
+stop the progress of the great truth propounded by Copernicus, and
+demonstrated by thee, than they can stop the revolving earth.
+
+Close now, venerable sage, that sightless, tearful eye; it has seen what
+man never before saw--it has seen enough. Hang up that poor little
+spy-glass--it has done its work. Not Herschell nor Rosse have,
+comparatively, done more. Franciscans and Dominicans deride thy
+discoveries now; but the time will come when, from two hundred
+observatories in Europe and America, the glorious artillery of science
+shall nightly assault the skies, but they shall gain no conquests in
+those glittering fields before which thine shall be forgotten. Rest in
+peace, great Columbus of the heavens--like him scorned, persecuted,
+broken-hearted!--in other ages, in distant hemispheres, when the
+votaries of science, with solemn acts of consecration, shall dedicate
+their stately edifices to the cause of knowledge and truth, thy name
+shall be mentioned with honor.
+
+
+                 NEW PERIODS IN ASTRONOMICAL SCIENCE.
+
+It is not my intention, in dwelling with such emphasis upon the
+invention of the telescope, to ascribe undue importance, in promoting
+the advancement of science, to the increase of instrumental power. Too
+much, indeed, cannot be said of the service rendered by its first
+application in confirming and bringing into general repute the
+Copernican system; but for a considerable time, little more was effected
+by the wondrous instrument than the gratification of curiosity and
+taste, by the inspection of the planetary phases, and the addition of
+the rings and satellites of Saturn to the solar family. Newton,
+prematurely despairing of any further improvement in the refracting
+telescope, applied the principle of reflection; and the nicer
+observations now made, no doubt, hastened the maturity of his great
+discovery of the law of gravitation; but that discovery was the work of
+his transcendent genius and consummate skill.
+
+With Bradley, in 1741, a new period commenced in instrumental astronomy,
+not so much of discovery as of measurement. The superior accuracy and
+minuteness with which the motions and distances of the heavenly bodies
+were now observed, resulted in the accumulation of a mass of new
+materials, both for tabular comparison and theoretical speculation.
+These materials formed the enlarged basis of astronomical science
+between Newton and Sir William Herschell. His gigantic reflectors
+introduced the astronomer to regions of space before unvisited--extended
+beyond all previous conception the range of the observed phenomena, and
+with it proportionably enlarged the range of constructive theory. The
+discovery of a new primary planet and its attendant satellites was but
+the first step of his progress into the labyrinth of the heavens.
+Cotemporaneously with his observations, the French astronomers, and
+especially La Place, with a geometrical skill scarcely, if at all,
+inferior to that of its great author, resumed the whole system of
+Newton, and brought every phenomenon observed since his time within his
+laws. Difficulties of fact, with which he struggled in vain, gave way to
+more accurate observations; and problems that defied the power of his
+analysis, yielded to the modern improvements of the calculus.
+
+
+                      HERSCHELL'S NEBULAR THEORY.
+
+But there is no _Ultima Thule_ in the progress of science. With the
+recent augmentations of telescopic power, the details of the nebular
+theory, proposed by Sir W. Herschell with such courage and ingenuity,
+have been drawn in question. Many--most--of those milky patches in which
+he beheld what he regarded as cosmical matter, as yet in an unformed
+state,--the rudimental material of worlds not yet condensed,--have been
+resolved into stars, as bright and distinct as any in the firmament. I
+well recall the glow of satisfaction with which, on the 22d of
+September, 1847, being then connected with the University at Cambridge,
+I received a letter from the venerable director of the Observatory
+there, beginning with these memorable words:--"You will rejoice with me
+that the great nebula in Orion has yielded to the powers of our
+incomparable telescope! * * * It should be borne in mind that this
+nebula, and that of Andromeda [which has been also resolved at
+Cambridge], are the last strongholds of the nebular theory."[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Annals of the Observatory of Harvard College_, p. 121.]
+
+But if some of the adventurous speculations built by Sir William
+Herschell on the bewildering revelations of his telescope have been
+since questioned, the vast progress which has been made in sidereal
+astronomy, to which, as I understand, the Dudley Observatory will be
+particularly devoted, the discovery of the parallax of the fixed stars,
+the investigation of the interior relations of binary and triple systems
+of stars, the theories for the explanation of the extraordinary, not to
+say fantastic, shapes discerned in some of the nebulous systems--whirls
+and spirals radiating through spaces as vast as the orbit of Neptune;[A]
+the glimpses at systems beyond that to which our sun belongs;--these are
+all splendid results, which may fairly be attributed to the school of
+Herschell, and will for ever insure no secondary place to that name in
+the annals of science.
+
+[Footnote A: See the remarkable memoir of Professor Alexander, "On the
+origin of the forms and the present condition of some of the clusters of
+stars, and several of the nebulae," (Gould's _Astronomical Journal_, Vol.
+iii, p. 95.)]
+
+
+                   RELATIONSHIP OF THE LIBERAL ARTS.
+
+In the remarks which I have hitherto made, I have had mainly in view the
+direct connection of astronomical science with the uses of life and the
+service of man. But a generous philosophy contemplates the subject in
+higher relations. It is a remark as old, at least, as Plato, and is
+repeated from him more than once by Cicero, that all the liberal arts
+have a common bond and relationship.[A] The different sciences
+contemplate as their immediate object the different departments of
+animate and inanimate nature; but this great system itself is but one,
+and its parts are so interwoven with each other, that the most
+extraordinary relations and unexpected analogies are constantly
+presenting themselves; and arts and sciences seemingly the least
+connected, render to each other the most effective assistance.
+
+[Footnote A: Archias, i.; De Oratore, iii., 21.]
+
+The history of electricity, galvanism, and magnetism, furnishes the most
+striking illustration of this remark. Commencing with the meteorological
+phenomena of our own atmosphere, and terminating with the observation of
+the remotest heavens, it may well be adduced, on an occasion like the
+present. Franklin demonstrated the identity of lightning and the
+electric fluid. This discovery gave a great impulse to electrical
+research, with little else in view but the means of protection from the
+thunder-cloud. A purely accidental circumstance led the physician
+Galvani, at Bologna, to trace the mysterious element, under conditions
+entirely novel, both of development and application. In this new form it
+became, in the hands of Davy, the instrument of the most extraordinary
+chemical operations; and earths and alkalis, touched by the creative
+wire, started up into metals that float on water, and kindle in the air.
+At a later period, the closest affinities are observed between
+electricity and magnetism, on the one hand; while, on the other, the
+relations of polarity are detected between acids and alkalis. Plating
+and gilding henceforth become electrical processes. In the last
+applications of the same subtle medium, it has become the messenger of
+intelligence across the land and beneath the sea; and is now employed by
+the astronomer to ascertain the difference of longitudes, to transfer
+the beats of the clock from one station to another, and to record the
+moment of his observations with automatic accuracy. How large a share
+has been borne by America in these magnificent discoveries and
+applications, among the most brilliant achievements of modern science,
+will sufficiently appear from the repetition of the names of Franklin,
+Henry, Morse, Walker, Mitchell, Lock, and Bond.
+
+
+                         VERSATILITY OF GENIUS.
+
+It has sometimes happened, whether from the harmonious relations to each
+other of every department of science, or from rare felicity of
+individual genius, that the most extraordinary intellectual versatility
+has been manifested by the same person. Although Newton's transcendent
+talent did not blaze out in childhood, yet as a boy he discovered great
+aptitude for mechanical contrivance. His water-clock, self-moving
+vehicle, and mill, were the wonder of the village; the latter propelled
+by a living mouse. Sir David Brewster represents the accounts as
+differing, whether the mouse was made to advance "by a string attached
+to its tail," or by "its unavailing attempts to reach a portion of corn
+placed above the wheel." It seems more reasonable to conclude that the
+youthful discoverer of the law of gravitation intended by the
+combination of these opposite attractions to produce a balanced
+movement. It is consoling to the average mediocrity of the race to
+perceive in these sportive assays, that the mind of Newton passed
+through the stage of boyhood. But emerging from boyhood, what a bound it
+made, as from earth to heaven! Hardly commencing bachelor of arts, at
+the age of twenty-four, he untwisted the golden and silver threads of
+the solar spectrum, simultaneously or soon after conceived the method of
+fluxions, and arrived at the elemental idea of universal gravity before
+he had passed to his master's degree. Master of Arts indeed! That
+degree, if no other, was well bestowed. Universities are unjustly
+accused of fixing science in stereotype. That diploma is enough of
+itself to redeem the honors of academical parchment from centuries of
+learned dullness and scholastic dogmatism.
+
+But the great object of all knowledge is to enlarge and purify the soul,
+to fill the mind with noble contemplations, to furnish a refined
+pleasure, and to lead our feeble reason from the works of nature up to
+its great Author and Sustainer. Considering this as the ultimate end of
+science, no branch of it can surely claim precedence of Astronomy. No
+other science furnishes such a palpable embodiment of the abstractions
+which lie at the foundation of our intellectual system; the great ideas
+of time, and space, and extension, and magnitude, and number, and
+motion, and power. How grand the conception of the ages on ages required
+for several of the secular equations of the solar system; of distances
+from which the light of a fixed star would not reach us in twenty
+millions of years, of magnitudes compared with which the earth is but a
+foot-ball; of starry hosts--suns like our own--numberless as the sands
+on the shore; of worlds and systems shooting through the infinite
+spaces, with a velocity compared with which the cannon-ball is a
+way-worn, heavy-paced traveler![A]
+
+[Footnote A: Nichol's _Architecture of the Heavens_, p. 160.]
+
+
+                    THE SPECTACLE OF THE HEAVENS.
+
+Much, however, as we are indebted to our observatories for elevating our
+conceptions of the heavenly bodies, they present, even to the unaided
+sight, scenes of glory which words are too feeble to describe. I had
+occasion, a few weeks since, to take the early train from Providence to
+Boston; and for this purpose rose at 2 o'clock in the morning. Every
+thing around was wrapped in darkness and hushed in silence, broken only
+by what seemed at that hour the unearthly clank and rush of the train.
+It was a mild, serene midsummer's night; the sky was without a
+cloud--the winds were whist. The moon, then in the last quarter, had
+just risen, and the stars shone with a spectral luster but little
+affected by her presence; Jupiter, two hours high, was the herald of the
+day; the Pleiades, just above the horizon, shed their sweet influence in
+the east; Lyra sparkled near the zenith; Andromeda veiled her newly
+discovered glories from the naked eye in the south; the steady Pointers,
+far beneath the pole, looked meekly up from the depths of the north to
+their sovereign.
+
+Such was the glorious spectacle as I entered the train. As we proceeded,
+the timid approach of twilight became more perceptible; the intense blue
+of the sky began to soften, the smaller stars, like little children,
+went first to rest; the sister-beams of the Pleiades soon melted
+together; but the bright constellations of the west and north remained
+unchanged. Steadily the wondrous transfiguration went on. Hands of
+angels hidden from mortal eyes shifted the scenery of the heavens; the
+glories of night dissolved into the glories of the dawn. The blue sky
+now turned more softly gray; the great watch-stars shut up their holy
+eyes; the east began to kindle. Faint streaks of purple soon blushed
+along the sky; the whole celestial concave was filled with the inflowing
+tides of the morning light, which came pouring down from above in one
+great ocean of radiance; till at length, as we reached the Blue Hills, a
+flash of purple fire blazed out from above the horizon, and turned the
+dewy teardrops of flower and leaf into rubies and diamonds. In a few
+seconds the everlasting gates of the morning were thrown wide open, and
+the lord of day, arrayed in glories too severe for the gaze of man,
+began his course.
+
+I do not wonder at the superstition of the ancient Magians, who in the
+morning of the world went up to the hill-tops of Central Asia, and
+ignorant of the true God, adored the most glorious work of his hand. But
+I am filled with amazement, when I am told that in this enlightened age,
+and in the heart of the Christian world, there are persons who can
+witness this daily manifestation of the power and wisdom of the Creator,
+and yet say in their hearts, "There is no God."
+
+
+                          UNDISCOVERED BODIES.
+
+Numerous as are the heavenly bodies visible to the naked eye, and
+glorious as are their manifestations, it is probable that in our own
+system there are great numbers as yet undiscovered. Just two hundred
+years ago this year, Huyghens announced the discovery of one satellite
+of Saturn, and expressed the opinion that the six planets and six
+satellites then known, and making up the perfect number of _twelve_,
+composed the whole of our planetary system. In 1729 an astronomical
+writer expressed the opinion that there might be other bodies in our
+system, but that the limit of telescopic power had been reached, and no
+further discoveries were likely to be made.[A] The orbit of one comet
+only had been definitively calculated. Since that time the power of the
+telescope has been indefinitely increased; two primary planets of the
+first class, ten satellites, and forty-three small planets revolving
+between Mars and Jupiter, have been discovered, the orbits of six or
+seven hundred comets, some of brief period, have been ascertained;--and
+it has been computed, that hundreds of thousands of these mysterious
+bodies wander through our system. There is no reason to think that all
+the primary planets, which revolve about the sun, have been discovered.
+An indefinite increase in the number of asteroids may be anticipated;
+while outside of Neptune, between our sun and the nearest fixed star,
+supposing the attraction of the sun to prevail through half the
+distance, there is room for ten more primary planets succeeding each
+other at distances increasing in a geometrical ratio. The first of these
+will, unquestionably, be discovered as soon as the perturbations of
+Neptune shall have been accurately observed; and with maps of the
+heavens, on which the smallest telescopic stars are laid down, it may be
+discovered much sooner.
+
+[Footnote A: _Memoirs of A.A.S._, vol. iii, 275.]
+
+
+                       THE VASTNESS OF CREATION.
+
+But it is when we turn our observation and our thoughts from our own
+system, to the systems which lie beyond it in the heavenly spaces, that
+we approach a more adequate conception of the vastness of creation. All
+analogy teaches us that the sun which gives light to us is but one of
+those countless stellar fires which deck the firmament, and that every
+glittering star in that shining host is the center of a system as vast
+and as full of subordinate luminaries as our own. Of these suns--centers
+of planetary systems--thousands are visible to the naked eye, millions
+are discovered by the telescope. Sir John Herschell, in the account of
+his operations at the Cape of Good Hope (p. 381) calculates that about
+five and a half millions of stars are visible enough to be _distinctly
+counted_ in a twenty-foot reflector, in both hemispheres. He adds, that
+"the actual number is much greater, there can be little doubt." His
+illustrious father, estimated on one occasion that 125,000 stars passed
+through the field of his forty foot reflector in a quarter of an hour.
+This would give 12,000,000 for the entire circuit of the heavens, in a
+single telescopic zone; and this estimate was made under the assumption
+that the nebulae were masses of luminous matter not yet condensed into
+suns.
+
+These stupendous calculations, however, form but the first column of the
+inventory of the universe. Faint white specks are visible, even to the
+naked eye of a practiced observer in different parts of the heavens.
+Under high magnifying powers, several thousands of such spots are
+visible,--no longer however, faint, white specks, but many of them
+resolved by powerful telescopes into vast aggregations of stars, each of
+which may, with propriety, be compared with the milky way. Many of these
+nebulae, however, resisted the power of Sir Wm. Herschell's great
+reflector, and were, accordingly, still regarded by him as masses of
+unformed matter, not yet condensed into suns. This, till a few years
+since, was, perhaps, the prevailing opinion; and the nebular theory
+filled a large space in modern astronomical science. But with the
+increase of instrumental power, especially under the mighty grasp of
+Lord Rosse's gigantic reflector, and the great refractors at Pulkova and
+Cambridge, the most irresolvable of these nebulae have given way; and the
+better opinion now is, that every one of them is a galaxy, like our own
+milky way, composed of millions of suns. In other words, we are brought
+to the bewildering conclusion that thousands of these misty specks, the
+greater part of them too faint to be seen with the naked eye, are, not
+each a universe like our solar system, but each a "swarm" of universes
+of unappreciable magnitude.[A] The mind sinks, overpowered by the
+contemplation. We repeat the words, but they no longer convey distinct
+ideas to the understanding.
+
+[Footnote A: Humboldt's _Cosmos_, iii. 41.]
+
+
+                      CONCEPTIONS OF THE UNIVERSE.
+
+But these conclusions, however vast their comprehension, carry us but
+another step forward in the realms of sidereal astronomy. A proper
+motion in space of our sun, and of the fixed stars as we call them, has
+long been believed to exist. Their vast distances only prevent its being
+more apparent. The great improvement of instruments of measurement
+within the last generation has not only established the existence of
+this motion, but has pointed to the region in the starry vault around
+which our whole solar and stellar system, with its myriad of attendant
+planetary worlds, appears to be performing a mighty revolution. If,
+then, we assume that outside of the system to which we belong and in
+which our sun is but a star like Aldebaran or Sirius, the different
+nebulae of which we have spoken,--thousands of which spot the
+heavens--constitute a distinct family of universes, we must, following
+the guide of analogy, attribute to each of them also, beyond all the
+revolutions of their individual attendant planetary systems, a great
+revolution, comprehending the whole; while the same course of analogical
+reasoning would lead us still further onward, and in the last analysis,
+require us to assume a transcendental connection between all these
+mighty systems--a universe of universes, circling round in the infinity
+of space, and preserving its equilibrium by the same laws of mutual
+attraction which bind the lower worlds together.
+
+It may be thought that conceptions like these are calculated rather to
+depress than to elevate us in the scale of being; that, banished as he
+is by these contemplations to a corner of creation, and there reduced to
+an atom, man sinks to nothingness in this infinity of worlds. But a
+second thought corrects the impression. These vast contemplations are
+well calculated to inspire awe, but not abasement. Mind and matter are
+incommensurable. An immortal soul, even while clothed in "this muddy
+vesture of decay," is in the eye of God and reason, a purer essence than
+the brightest sun that lights the depths of heaven. The organized human
+eye, instinct with life and soul, which, gazing through the telescope,
+travels up to the cloudy speck in the handle of Orion's sword, and bids
+it blaze forth into a galaxy as vast as ours, stands higher in the order
+of being than all that host of luminaries. The intellect of Newton which
+discovered the law that holds the revolving worlds together, is a nobler
+work of God than a universe of universes of unthinking matter.
+
+If, still treading the loftiest paths of analogy, we adopt the
+supposition,--to me I own the grateful supposition,--that the countless
+planetary worlds which attend these countless suns, are the abodes of
+rational beings like man, instead of bringing back from this exalted
+conception a feeling of insignificance, as if the individuals of our
+race were but poor atoms in the infinity of being, I regard it, on the
+contrary, as a glory of our human nature, that it belongs to a family
+which no man can number of rational natures like itself. In the order of
+being they may stand beneath us, or they may stand above us; _he_ may
+well be content with his place, who is made "a little lower than the
+angels."
+
+
+                     CONTEMPLATION OF THE HEAVENS.
+
+Finally, my Friends, I believe there is no contemplation better adapted
+to awaken devout ideas than that of the heavenly bodies,--no branch of
+natural science which bears clearer testimony to the power and wisdom of
+God than that to which you this day consecrate a temple. The heart of
+the ancient world, with all the prevailing ignorance of the true nature
+and motions of the heavenly orbs, was religiously impressed by their
+survey. There is a passage in one of those admirable philosophical
+treatises of Cicero composed in the decline of life, as a solace under
+domestic bereavement and patriotic concern at the impending convulsions
+of the state, in which, quoting from some lost work of Aristotle, he
+treats the topic in a manner which almost puts to shame the teachings of
+Christian wisdom.
+
+"Praeclare ergo Aristoteles, 'Si essent,' inquit, 'qui sub terra semper
+habitavissent, bonis et illustribus domiciliis quae essent ornata signis
+atque picturis, instructaque rebus iis omnibus quibus abundant ii qui
+beati putantur, nec tamen exissent unquam supra terram; accepissent
+autem fama et auditione, esse quoddam numen et vim Deorum,--deinde
+aliquo tempore patefactis terrae faucibus ex illis abditis sedibus
+evadere in haec loca quae nos incolimus, atque exire potuissent; cum
+repente terram et maria coelumque, vidissent; nubium magnitudinem
+ventorumque vim, cognovissent; aspexissentque solem, ejusque tum
+magnitudinem, pulchritudinemque; tum etiam efficientiam cognovissent,
+quod is diem efficeret, toto coelo luce diffusa; cum autem terras nox
+opacasset, tum coelum totum cernerent astris distinctum et ornatum,
+lunaeque luminum varietatem tum crescentis tum senescentis, corumque
+omnium ortus et occasus atque in aeternitate ratos immutabilesque
+cursus;--haec cum viderent, profecto et esse Deos, et haec tanta opera
+Deorum esse, arbitrarentur."[A]
+
+There is much by day to engage the attention of the Observatory; the
+sun, his apparent motions, his dimensions, the spots on his disc (to us
+the faint indications of movements of unimagined grandeur in his
+luminous atmosphere), a solar eclipse, a transit of the inferior
+planets, the mysteries of the spectrum;--all phenomena of vast
+importance and interest. But night is the astronomer's accepted time; he
+goes to his delightful labors when the busy world goes to its rest. A
+dark pall spreads over the resorts of active life; terrestrial objects,
+hill and valley, and rock and stream, and the abodes of men disappear;
+but the curtain is drawn up which concealed the heavenly hosts. There
+they shine and there they move, as they moved and shone to the eyes of
+Newton and Galileo, of Kepler and Copernicus, of Ptolemy and Hipparchus;
+yes, as they moved and shone when the morning stars sang together, and
+all the sons of God shouted for joy. All has changed on earth; but the
+glorious heavens remain unchanged. The plow passes over the site of
+mighty cities,--the homes of powerful nations are desolate, the
+languages they spoke are forgotten; but the stars that shone for them
+are shining for us; the same eclipses run their steady cycle; the same
+equinoxes call out the flowers of spring, and send the husbandman to the
+harvest; the sun pauses at either tropic as he did when his course
+began; and sun and moon, and planet and satellite, and star and
+constellation and galaxy, still bear witness to the power, the wisdom,
+and the love, which placed them in the heavens and uphold them there.
+
+[Footnote A: "Nobly does Aristotle observe, that if there were beings
+who had always lived under ground, in convenient, nay, in magnificent
+dwellings, adorned with statues and pictures, and every thing which
+belongs to prosperous life, but who had never come above ground; who had
+heard, however, by fame and report, of the being and power of the gods;
+if, at a certain time, the portals of the earth being thrown open, they
+had been able to emerge from those hidden abodes to the regions
+inhabited by us; when suddenly they had seen the earth, the sea, and the
+sky; had perceived the vastness of the clouds and the force of the
+winds; had contemplated the sun, his magnitude and his beauty, and still
+more his effectual power, that it is he who makes the day, by the
+diffusion of his light through the whole sky; and, when night had
+darkened the earth, should then behold the whole heavens studded and
+adorned with stars, and the various lights of the waxing and waning
+moon, the risings and the settings of all these heavenly bodies, and the
+courses fixed and immutable in all eternity; when, I say, they should
+see these things, truly they would believe that there were gods, and
+these so great things are their works."--Cicero, _De Natura Deorum_ lib.
+ii., section 30.]
+
+
+
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