ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETIES AND ASTRONOMERS. 817 



ence has advanced only by the labors of philosophers, who pur- 

 sued it as a matter of taste and not officially. Was it not as an 

 amateur that the canon Copernicus discovered the true system 

 of the world ? As an amateur on his little estate at Woolstrop 

 the thinker Newton discovered universal gravitation. Caven- 

 dish, who first weighed the earth, was an amateur. Belonging to 

 a noble and wealthy English family, he devoted his whole life to 

 the advancement of science. He was, said Biot, the wealthiest 

 of the learned, and probably also the most learned of the rich. 



Are those not also amateurs who have made the most advance 

 in the study of the moon ? Hevelius, a counselor of Dantsic, 

 who first undertook to define the form and position of the lunar 

 spots ? To whom do we owe the details of lunar topography ? 

 To enthusiastic amateurs in astronomy Schroeter and Lohrman 

 in Germany, and the machinist Nasmyth in England. And now 

 we can count by the hundred the men who give their time to 

 observing our satellite in all its details ; and a new fact is added 

 every day to those which we already know. 



The knowledge which we possess of the spots and faculsB of 

 the sun is also derived from materials collected by amateur as- 

 tronomers. We cite first Fabricius, who, living at the beginning 

 of the seventeenth century, first observed the spots and ascer- 

 tained the period of solar rotation. An amateur, also, Schwabe, 

 of Dessau, discovered the periodicity of the solar spots, and Car- 

 rington, Warren, and De la Rue made their admirable studies on 

 the central star of our system. Janssen found a way to observe 

 the protuberances without being obliged to wait for the rare and 

 brief instants of total eclipses ; the musician, William Herschel, 

 extended the frontiers of the solar republic, and radically trans- 

 formed sidereal astronomy ; the mathematician, Le Verrier, then 

 a stranger to the Observatory of Paris, discovered Neptune in the 

 depths of space, a milliard of leagues from here ; and Dambouski, 

 Burnham, and Gledhill, skilled observers of double stars, have 

 measured the couples that move in remote parts of the sky. 



We could not, if we should try, cite the names of all the ama- 

 teurs who have discovered comets. It was an amateur in astron- 

 omy, Flangergues, of Viviers, who first observed the celebrated 

 comet of 1811, the length and brightness of whose tail were the 

 wonder of our ancestors. At seventy-one years of age this inde- 

 fatigable amateur of astronomical science was so happy as to dis- 

 cover a second comet. Among comet-hunters, we should not for- 

 get Pons, porter of the Observatory of Marseilles, who had in 

 France no rival as a discoverer of comets except Mersier, Director 

 of the Observatory of Paris, whom Louis XV surnamed the 

 " comet ferret." 



Besides their activity as discoverers, amateurs have also done 



TOL. XXXIX. 60 



