SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 323 



States in extending the boundaries of scientific knowledge, especially 

 in the physical and chemical departments, have been set forth. " "We 

 must acknowledge with shame our inferiority to other people," says 

 one. " We have done nothing," says another. Well, if all this be 

 true, we ought perhaps to look to the condition of our colleges for an 

 explanation. But we must not forget that many of these humiliating 

 accusations are made by persons who are not of authority in the matter ; 

 who, because they are ignorant of what has beeu done, think that 

 nothing has been done. They mistake what is merely a blank in their 

 own information for a blank in reality. In their alacrity to depreciate 

 the merit of their own country, a most unpatriotic alacrity, they would 

 have us confess that for the last century we have been living on the 

 reputation of Franklin and his thunder-rod. 



Perhaps, then, we may without vanity recall some facts that may 

 relieve us in a measure from the weight of this heavy accusation. We 

 have sent out expeditions of exploration both to the Arctic and Antarc- 

 tic seas. We have submitted our own coast to an hydrographic and 

 geodesic survey, not excelled in exactness and extent by any similar 

 works elsewhere. In the accomplishment of this we have been com- 

 pelled to solve many physical problems of the greatest delicacy and 

 highest importance, and we have done it successfully. The measuring- 

 rods with which the three great base-lines of Maine, Long Island, 

 Georgia, were determined, and their beautiful mechanical appliances, 

 have exacted the publicly-expressed admiration of some of the greatest 

 European philosophers, and the conduct of that survey their unstinted 

 applause. We have instituted geological surveys of many of our 

 States and much of our Territories, and have been rewarded not merely 

 by manifold local benefits, but also by the higher honor of extending 

 very greatly the boundaries of that noble science. At an enormous 

 annual cost we have maintained a meteorological-signal system, which 

 I think is not equaled and certainly is not surpassed in the world. 

 Should it be said that selfish interests have been mixed up with some 

 of these undertakings, we may demand whether there was any selfish- 

 ness in the survey of the Dead Sea? Was there any selfishness in 

 that mission which a citizen of New York sent to equatorial Africa 

 for the finding and relief of Livingstone, any in the astronomical ex- 

 pedition to South America, any in that to the valley of the Amazon ? 

 Was there any in the sending out of parties for the observation of the 

 total eclipses of the sun ? It was by American astronomers that the 

 true character of his corona was first determined. Was there any in 

 the seven expeditions that were dispatched for observing the transit 

 of Venus ? Was it not here that the bi-partition of Bela's comet was 

 first detected, here that the eighth satellite of Saturn was discovered, 

 here that the dusky ring of that planet, which had escaped the pene- 

 trating eye of Herschel and all the great European astronomers, was 

 first seen ? Was it not by an American telescope that the companion 



