162 BENJAMIN APTHORP GOULD— COMSTOCK. IMb "°™'vo™™£ 



servations of Fixed Stars," made by Joseph Lepaute DAgelet at Paris in 1783-1785. In this 

 paper, published by the academy as its first memoir, Gould rescues from oblivion a meritorious 

 series of observations made at an epoch when such work was rare, and which by lapse of time 

 had become an important part of the material then available for the study of stellar motions. 

 In August of the same year Gould presented to the academy its first biographical memoir, a 

 eulogy of Joseph S. Hubbard, the first of its incorporators to be removed by death. 



Following the completion of his commercial career, Gould suddenly appears in an unex- 

 pected role for which his prior training seemed to himself of doubtful adequacy, viz, actuary to 

 the United States Sanitary Commission, charged with accumulating from the military and naval 

 service of the United States extensive data relative to the physical character and quality of the 

 men composing it. The commission's statistical bureau, of which Gould took charge in July, 

 1864, was a very considerable organization whose personnel contained more than a sprinkling 

 of names subsequently famous. Its immediate duty was to collect, tabulate, and discuss vital 

 statistics, e. g., the distribution among the troops, of age, stature, nativity, color of eyes, length 

 of bone, pulmonary capacity, etc., and in Gould's words its " action was controlled by a constant 

 regard to those hygienic and physiological laws which are already known, and by an anxious 

 desire to discover and apply such other laws as might affect the welfare and success of our 

 soldiers.!' Gould's energy and organizing power made amends for the scant familiarity with 

 those "known laws" which he publicly confesses and deplores; and the "Statistical Volume," 

 Volume III, issued by the commission, gives abundant illustration of the astronomer seeking 

 to apply to new problems in a new field such familiar tools as empirical equations and the method 

 of least squares. 



Formidable obstacles to the work of his bureau speedily developed, apparently through 

 professional reluctance to communicate valuable data to a rival organization, and the actuary 

 found himself cut off first from the records of the Surgeon General's office and a little later, by 

 direct order of the Secretary of War, from the records of The Adjutant General, United States 

 Army. Despite the barriers thus opposed to him Gould succeeded in collecting, organizing, 

 and publishing a great body of data whose value and influence are still held by competent 

 scholars to be of the first importance. 



It was while engaged in this work that Gould's attention and purpose were captivated by the 

 beginnings of what was to become the magnum opus of his life. That part of the heavens 

 visible from Europe had been surveyed and charted by astronomers, among whom his own 

 masters and friends held a conspicuous place. Something of the same kind had been done by 

 his friend Lieut. Gilliss for the region surrounding the south celestial pole, but between this 

 area and that covered by the northern surveys lay a broad expanse of sky which, if not an 

 absolutely virgin field, was at least one known only in the most fragmentary way. For its 

 systematic exploration and the cataloguing of its stars Gould possessed both the will and the 

 technical competence. As the project grew in his mind from a dream'into an ardent purpose, 

 he was assured that his Massachusetts friends were prepared to put at his disposal considerable 

 sums of money for its achievement. The scheme involved, necessarily, his own expatriation 

 for a time during which he should erect somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere a temporary 

 observatory and should in two or three years make there the needed observations and then bring 

 home his data for such study and treatment as should prove needful to bring forth their results 

 and to fill the last great gap in the exploration of the sky. For information and counsel in the 

 matter he turned to his friend Sarmiento, then minister of the Argentine Republic, resident in 

 Washington. Were the local conditions in Argentina satisfactory for such a project ? Would 

 its Government welcome such a scientific expedition ? What would be its status after reaching 

 that country, etc. ? The response was most encouraging. The Argentine Government would not 

 only welcome the undertaking, it would adopt it as its own child, erect and maintain its observ- 

 atory, not for a term of years only, but indefinitely, as a national scientific foundation. But the 

 negotiations thus briefly summarized were spread out over many months, during which Gould's 

 relations with the Sanitary Commission and with the Coast Survey were terminated and during 



