160 BENJAMIN APTHORP GOULD— COMSTOCK. IMb " 0,, [vo"xv,i' 



law — a mere brute force' ' — scattering and destroying his papers as well as doing indignity to 

 his person. 



A somewhat voluminous literature has grown about the events here briefly summarized and 

 concerning it two comments seem in order: (a) The opinion of astronomers wholeheartedly 

 supports Gould's scientific administration of the Dudley Observatory, i. e., the essential part 

 of the controversy, and the part upon which their judgement possesses unique technical compe- 

 tence. But to this consensus of opinoin there were two conspicuous exceptions. To Gould's 

 chagrin two astronomers of note, Bruennow and Peters, took sides with the hostile majority 

 of the trustees, and he notes that both these men are of foreign birth and training, recent comers 

 to a new environment of which they had little understanding, (b) The exacerbated temper 

 manifest in the controversy suggests the presence behind it of elements not publicly avowed. 

 Local tradition still names as such an element Gould's faculty for mimicry and mordant charac- 

 terization. 



The Dudley Observatory had been an added burden to his already overtaxed pecuniary 

 resources and during his unsalaried connection with it Gould had carried on, with compensation, 

 a prior undertaking to reduce, discuss and save from oblivion the work of Lieut. Gilliss, United 

 States Navy, who, in the years 1849-1852 had conducted a "U. S. naval astronomical expedition 

 to the Southern Hemisphere." A major purpose of this expedition was to determine the solar 

 parallax from observations of Mars and Venus, executed in Chile in accordance with a well- 

 conceived plan. As an essential supplement to the data thus acquired Gilliss had counted 

 upon similar observations being simultaneously made at observatories in the Northern Hem- 

 isphere and he was grievously disappointed by failure* of the expected cooperation. This 

 mishap seriously impaired the value of his laborious work and rendered inapplicable the methods 

 planned for its utilization. By arrangement with Gilliss, Gould took over the entire body of 

 data, the scanty northern observations as well as the more complete southern material, devised 

 new methods for its treatment and in No. Ill of the four quarto volumes devoted to making 

 public the expedition and its work he sets forth those methods and their result. The discussion 

 is admirable and accordant with the best traditions of his German teachers but in the light of 

 more recent knowledge it seems only to illustrate the oft-forgotten adage that bread is not made 

 from chaff. His data were quite inadequate and his result fell farther from the truth than were 

 the current values of the sun's distance that he sought to supplant. The compensation paid 

 for the work, which is said to have been expended upon the Dudley Observatory, served only 

 as a foundation for the charge of willful neglect of duty to it in seeking pecuniary gain through 

 outside employment 



The Dudley Observatory episode having become a closed incident, in 1859 Gould returned 

 to Cambridge and took up again the threads of his former life. He turned to more sedate 

 employment, not embittered but, as his friends said, softened and sweetened by Albany and 

 its harrassing vicissitudes. Outside the "Reply," his own public comment on these events is 

 singularly reserved and sober. A chance remark, made years afterward, that they "had taught 

 him how to fight" probably does scant justice to his native quality. The first fruits of the new 

 work, apparently executed in 1859 but not published until 1862, were his Standard Right 

 Ascensions of Circumpolar and Time Stars, prepared for the use of the United States Coast 

 Survey. Gould here inaugurated, for the benefit of his longitude work, a practice of funda- 

 mental importance for the astronomy of j>recision, viz, the introduction of systematic cor- 

 rections to star catalogues. In untechnical language, he was one of the first to grasp and 

 successfully apply the idea, now a commonplace, that the coordinates of a hundred or a thou- 

 sand stars observed and published at a particular observatory are not finished data, but only 

 raw material that may be greatly improved by collation and comparison with external evidence. 

 The successful execution of this idea made the fortune of his star positions which almost at once 

 were adopted and long and widely used by astronomers as standards. 



In mitigation of the rigors of such serious work, Gould joined with certain young professors 

 who, like himself, were German University trained, in setting up, under the shadow of Harvard 

 College, bachelor quarters that speedily became the talk of the town and long remained one 



