4 oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SKETCH OF WILLIAM CRANCH BOND. 



IN seconding the obituary resolutions of the American Academy 

 of Arts and Sciences on the first director of the Harvard 

 College Observatory, ex-President Quincy used these words: "It 

 is not too much to say that the extent of his knowledge, the win- 

 ning urbanity of his manners, and his exemplary exactness in 

 life and as an observer, in a great degree effected the attainment 

 of those large means and increased powers which ultimately 

 raised to its present prosperous state the observatory over which 

 through subsequent life he watched, and which he left at death 

 honored and improved by his labors and genius." Let us briefly 

 trace the career which could deserve such a testimonial. 



William Cranch Bond was born in Portland, Me., September 

 9, 1789, being the youngest son in a family of several children. His 

 parents, Hannah (Cranch) and William Bond, were natives of 

 England and were married there. The Bond family can be traced 

 to the time of William the Conqueror, by whom Brandon Manor 

 is said to have been granted to the contemporary ancestor of that 

 line. William Bond was born in Plymouth, and became a clock- 

 maker and silversmith. Having been induced to emigrate to 

 America, he located at Portland, then called Falmouth, and en- 

 gaged in cutting ship timber which he sent to England. In a 

 short time he brought over his family, but the timber business 

 not proving successful, he removed to Boston in 1793 and took up 

 again his former occupation. His shop stood on one of the cor- 

 ners of Milk and Marlboro (now Washington) Streets, the other 

 being occupied by the Old South Church. William C. Bond was 

 then a Boston boy from the age of four years. He had little oppor- 

 tunity to attend school, for the circumstances of the family, as he 

 afterward told Josiah Quincy, " obliged me to become an appren- 

 tice to my father before I had learned the multiplication table." 

 But, judging from his later achievements, young William must 

 have been the kind of boy that picks up knowledge, so his lack of 

 set schooling was not so great a misfortune as it might seem. 



His eldest sister described him as having been, at the age of 

 fourteen, " a slender boy with soft gray eyes and silky brown hair, 

 quick to observe, yet shrinking from notice, and sensitive to 

 excess." She adds, in reference to his early developed tastes : 

 "The first that I remember was his intense anxiety about the 

 expected total eclipse of the sun of June 16, 1806. He had then 

 no instrument of his own, but watched the event from a house top 

 on Summer Street through a telescope belonging to Mr. Francis 

 Gray, to which somehow he got access. In so doing he injured 

 his eyes, and for a long time was troubled in his vision." 



