APPENDICES 369° 
expressly stating however that this letter is not intended to restrict the action of the 
Board of Directors more than shall in their judgment be expedient and fitting. 
First. My object in creating the Fund is two-fold; on the one hand to advance the 
science of astronomy, and on the other to honor my father’s memory and to insure that his 
power to accomplish scientific work shall not end with his own life. 
Second. Throughout my father’s lifetime his patriotic feeling and scientific ambition were 
closely associated, and I wish therefore that a fund bearing his name should be used 
primarily for the benefit of investigators in his own country or of his own nationality. I 
recognize however that sometimes the best possible service to American science is the 
maintenance of close communion between the scientific men of Europe and of America and 
that therefore even while acting in the spirit of the above restriction it may occasionally 
be best to apply this money to the aid of a foreign investigator working abroad. 
In connection with this I must refer to the strong interest felt by my father in the 
National Academy of Sciences, and to his belief in the importance of creating and maintain- 
ing a single national scientific body whose preeminence should be unquestionable, and of 
concentrating power in its hands. I wish to recommend that all three Directors shall be 
members of the Academy, although I have made this legally necessary for only two of the 
three, and to record the desire to serve the Academy so far as I am able as one of my minor 
motives in creating the Trust. 
Third. I have copied many of the provisions of the Bache Fund, and it is my hope that 
the Boards of Direction of the two Funds may always act in friendly unison, as befits the 
long and intimate friendship of the men whose work they perpetuate. I trust that the 
new Fund may relieve the Bache Directors of many astronomical expenses, and thus enable 
them to devote the same amounts of money to other branches of science. And I recommend 
the adoption of a custom now followed by the Bache Board of Directors, by which each 
Director upon his own election names to his colleagues the person whom he believes most 
fit to succeed him. 
Fourth. I wish that in all cases work in the Astronomy of Precision should be distinctly 
preferred to any work in Astrophysics, both because of my father’s personal preference 
and because of the present existence of generous endowments for Astrophysics. 
Fifth. The Astronomical Journal long conducted by my father has in my belief exerted 
a powerful influence in raising the standard of American astronomy; and in case at some 
future time its existence should be imperiled by lack of funds, I wish to recommend it to 
the attention of the then Board of Directors. As however I believe that the granting to 
any scientific journal of definite rights over such a Fund would be a dangerous precedent, 
I here repeat that the Directors are not to consider themselves bound by these my present 
wishes further than they deem appropriate in connection with a journal associated with 
my father’s name. 
Sixth. The Benjamin Apthorp Gould fund is intended for the advancement and not 
for the diffusion of scientific knowledge. Moreover I prefer that it should be used to defray 
the actual expenses of an investigation rather than for the personal support of the investi- 
gator during the time of his researches. I do not wish absolutely to exclude the latter im- 
portant use, but such an employment of funds seems to me more appropriately the function 
of a university than of the National Academy, and I hope therefore that before granting 
money for such a purpose the Directors will consider the existing university endowments and 
other sources of pecuniary aid for able workers in science. 
Finally I wish to express my entire faith in the wise judgment of the first Board of 
Directors and my sense of my own good fortune in being able to intrust a memorial of my 
father to the hands of men who have been both his scientific associates and his intimate 
personal friends. Aice BacHEe GouLp. 
Boston, November 17, 1897. 
