SKETCH OF PROFESSOR HILGARD. 617 



of tobacco has become a positive vice. The wastefulness of money 

 which it causes, without a compensatory advantage, is alone deplor- 

 able. Chamher.s's Journal. 



SKETCH OF PROFESSOR HILGARD. 



WE tliis month present to our readers the portrait of Julius E. 

 HiLGARD, First Assistant of the United States Coast Survey, 

 and President of the American Association for the Advancement of 

 Science at tlie meeting in Detroit, which takes place on the 11th of 

 August of tlie present year. Mr. Hilgard was born in January, 1825, 

 in the town of Zweibriicken, in Bavaria, where his father hold the 

 position of Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Palatinate of the 

 Rhine. At the age of nine years he came to the United States with 

 his father, who settled on a farm near Belleville, Illinois, where his 

 education, classical and mathematical, was continued by parental in- 

 struction, aided by the part he took in the education of several younger 

 brothers. At the age of eighteen he went to Philadelphia, and pursued 

 the study of civil engineering under the advice of such eminent engi- 

 neers as Roberts and Trautwine. His ardent desire for knowledge 

 attracted the attention of Dr. Patterson, Prof. Buche, and other mem- 

 bers of the Philosophical Society; and, soon after Prof. Bache took 

 charge of the Coast Survey, he attached young Hilgard to the corps 

 of assistants which he was about to form, and which, under his train- 

 ing, has attained so eminent a position as a scientific body. Hilgard 

 Avas soon recognized as one of the leading spirits of the work, and 

 by zeal in active service, untiring application, and the improvement 

 wrought in all branches of the work that he touched, rose to the posi- 

 tion of Chief of the Bureau of tlie Coast Survey at headquarters in 

 Washington. To this position, which he holds at the present time, 

 he was assigned at the beginning of the war of the rebellion, which 

 called forth the best efforts of every member of the Coast Survey, and 

 brought into play its resources of important information gathered 

 during previous years. 



Mr. Hilgard's scientific work has chiefly been in connection with 

 his practical labors, consisting of researches and disciission of results 

 in geodesy and terrestrial physics, and in perfecting methods and in- 

 strumental means connected with the same. The annual reports of 

 the Coast Survey contain numerous papers from his hand on the ap- 

 plication of the method of least squares to geodesy, on determinations 

 of latitude, azimuth, and longitude ; on methods of precision in meas- 

 urintr lengths, and on terrestrial mao;netism. In 1872 he executed, in 

 connection with the telegraphic determination of the longitude be- 

 tween America and Europe through the French cable, a similar de- 



