158 BENJAMIN APTHORP GOULD— COMSTOCK. [MbmoibS [vouSI^ 



of science." The hopes thus expressed have been in substance fulfilled. The Journal has been 

 largely influential in developing and dignifying American astronomy and its inception and early 

 success redound greatly to Gould's credit. But its career has been very unlike that fore- 

 shadowed in the first of the preceding quotations. For nearly a dozen years Gould's unremitting 

 effort and his pecuniary sacrifice maintained the Journal at a high level of scientific quality and 

 prestige, conjoined to a very low level of financial stability. An occasional published note from 

 the editor sets forth from time to time his precarious condition and in July, 1861, in the throes 

 of civil war, when "no American is able to investigate or study now with the calmness which 

 success requires," the editor announces that he is compelled to suspend publication, but he 

 hopes for an early resumption. That hope remained unrealized for a quarter century, and its 

 ultimate fruition must be told in a later part of this memoir. But even at this stage of its 

 career the Journal had justified the enthusiastic words of his eulogist: "He inspired a new 

 breath into American astronomy. The new atmosphere winch he brought with him from 

 Germany, where he caught the spirit of the great masters under whom he studied, became 

 gradually transfused through the States. His enthusiasm for the introduction of better means 

 and methods of research was caught by his compatriots, their courage in the effort to regenerate 

 our science was sustained, and transmitted through various channels to the next and to the 

 present generation." 



The 20 years that followed Gould's return to America present him as a man of multifarious 

 interests and activities for which a bond of union is to be found only in his own strong and 

 versatile personality. In 1852, the failing health of his friend and mentor Sears C. Walker 

 brought Gould into relations with the United States Coast Survey and soon afterward, as Walker's 

 successor, into responsible charge of its longitude determinations. For this work Walker had 

 commenced experimenting with the new electric telegraph and Gould, devoting himself with 

 characteristic ardor to the advancement of astronomical technique, developed and applied the 

 new device in the work of the survey until, as Loewy, his eulogist, stated to the French Academy, 

 he had made some 15 determinations of telegraphic longitude before Europe commenced to use 

 the method. Gould's somewhat irregular, part time, relations with the Coast Survey continued 

 until 1867 and were brilliantly crowned, at the very end, by his execution of the first telegraphic 

 determination of trans- Atlantic longitude ever made. His report upon this determination shows 

 Gould at his best, with a firm grip upon essential principles but struggling against accident and 

 adverse circumstance. He took for himself the European end of the line, and buried in the 

 almost unbroken fog and rain of the Irish coast he waited week after week for a glimpse of a 

 star or a swing of his magnetic needle to be made under the influence of a current closed or 

 opened in Newfoundland. When patience found its reward in a completed observing program 

 he turns from astronomy to physics in an attempt to utilize his new data for the improvement 

 of electrotechnics, and also he turns to psychology in a study of the personal equation with 

 particular reference to its lack of constancy when that virtue is most required. 



The same year that marked Gould's entrance into the Coast Survey contained also the 

 beginnings of what later was to prove to him a period of stress and trial, of recrimination and 

 chagrin, carried through some years of apparently fruitless labor. The details of this experi- 

 ence are voluminously set forth in his vigorous and at times acrimonious "Reply to the state- 

 ment of the trustees of the Dudley Observatory." This reply should be compared with the 

 no less acrimonious "Statement" itself, and the unprejudiced reader of both volumes can hardly 

 fail to be embarrassed by their irreconcilable accounts of the early history of a great institution. 

 In substance we witness in them a lawsuit fought out of court, and the present writer's relation 

 to a quasi legal controversy must be that of clerk rather than judge or jury. 



In the decade prior to 1850, Ormsby Macknight Mitchell had built up in Cincinnati an ob- 

 servatory that brought fame to him and prestige to the city that had given pecuniary support 

 to his work. Certain Albanians, i. e., citizens of Albany, in the State of New York, animated 

 with honorable civic pride, sought to rival and perchance outdo the western contribution to 

 science by building upon the banks of the Hudson another observatory that should not only 

 redound to their personal credit but should make in their city a center of light and learning. 



