550 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



a house, with a few acres of garden, at Ross View, near the foot 

 of the Blue Mountains, and there led a life of seemingly pure 

 enjoyment in his work, varied by excursions, of one of which, to 

 the higher mountain regions, he has left a full and most enter- 

 taining account. The colored people of the neighborhood had 

 borne a bad reputation, but Houzeau found them the best of neigh- 

 bors. He gathered them around him and taught them the rudi- 

 ments of science and something of literature. He taught the 

 children to read, and found by his experiments that the old way 

 of spelling the words out was better adapted to their mental con- 

 dition than the " philosophical " one by presenting syllables and 

 words to be learned bodily. He set up a printing-press, from 

 which he issued a numerical calculator, a table of logarithms, a 

 perpetual almanac, Families of Plants, and Correct Information 

 about Common Things, some of which works, however, were not 

 completed. The scientific journals were well supplied with the 

 articles which he produced during this period. The principal of 

 his works was the Study of the Mental Faculties of Man and Ani- 

 mals, on which he had labored for several years. It was warmly 

 commended by Mr. A. R. Wallace, who said it gave the author a 

 high rank among philosophical naturalists, and by Mr. W. Lauder 

 Lindsay, who regarded it as the peer of Darwin's works. The 

 Sky brought within Everybody's Reach was a clear, interesting, 

 and at the same time scientific popular treatise on astronomy. 

 He improved the favorable situation he enjoyed at Ross View for 

 new observations of the zodiacal light, and, perceiving the ad- 

 vantages which a pure atmosphere afforded for his work, con- 

 ceived and expressed the idea of seating observatories on the tops 

 of mountains, which has since been carried out at several places, 

 with all the good results he anticipated. He undertook in 1875 

 the preparation of a uranography, or map of all the heavens 

 visible to the naked eye. In order to enlarge the field of his 

 observations he spent a few weeks at Panama, and there, suffer- 

 ing from fever, contracted, in the service of science, the seeds of 

 the disease that carried him off a dozen years later. 



M. Lancaster thinks that Houzeau would have spent the rest 

 of his days in Jamaica, if the death of Quetelet in 1874 had not 

 prompted his recall to be the head of the observatory of Brussels. 

 As it was, he found, when he returned to his home from Panama, 

 a telegram announcing his appointment as director of this insti- 

 tution. The observatory had not of late years Quetelet having 

 been partly disabled by an apoplectic stroke suffered in 1855 

 kept up with the times. Its instruments had grown old-fash- 

 ioned, and there was a lack of energy in its work. A commission 

 was appointed after Quetelet's death to inquire what could be 

 done to restore it. All agreed that a man of vigor was needed, 



