166 BENJAMIN APTHORP GOULD— COMSTOCK. [M ™ 0, * 8 [v I ou™£ 



In one respect Cordoba proved a sore disappointment. Its sky, while sometimes marvel- 

 ously clear, revealing to the unaided eye stars of unprecedented faintness, was, upon the whole, 

 no more free from clouds than that of Boston. In 1870 the data by which this condition might 

 have been foretold did not exist. South American climatology was still in the embryo and one 

 of the first extensions given to Gould's scientific program was the creation of a weather bureau 

 and meteorological service for the Argentine. The Government, responding cordially to his 

 advances in the matter, entrusted to him the establishment and development of such a service. 

 Starting under conditions the reverse of favorable, with a competent personnel almost wholly 

 lacking and with conditions of transportation so crude that the shipment of even a thermometer 

 to a remote station was a hazardous undertaking, there was built up by slow degrees a modern 

 meteorological bureau. Up to the time of his final departure from South America Gould 

 retained active charge of this service, trained his own successor, one of his young American 

 aids, and transmitted to his able hands not only an efficient bureau but a well-developed 

 climatology for America south of the equator. 



Almost immediately after his arrival in Argentina Gould was appointed by its Government 

 to verify the standards of weight and measure actually in use throughout the Republic and to 

 this duty there was added a large amount of work in determining the geographical positions of 

 State capitals and in connecting by direct exchange of time signals the trans-Atlantic lon- 

 gitudes of the east and west coasts of South America. With a keen interest in the use and 

 extension of the metric system Gould served Argentina as its representative on the International 

 Commission for Weights and Measures and in simdar matters made his influence felt in humbler 

 bodies such as science clubs and organizations of engineers and surveyors. 



It was perhaps with foresight of these other similar opportunities and demands that, just 

 before leaving home, Gould, at the mature age of 46, allied himself with the order of Freemasons, 

 a body with which he maintained active connection during the remainder of his life. At Cordoba 

 he served as worshipful master of the Lodge of the Southern Cross and during the last decade 

 of his residence abroad he acted as an official intermediary between the Freemasonry of North 

 and South America. These relations must have rendered substantial aid to his South American 

 career for, serving the Argentine Government under four different administrations, Gould 

 maintained excellent relations with all of them and found in all a generous measure of support 

 for his scientific work that seems to have been realized with increasing difficulty by his successors. 

 He testifies to the cordial support given bim by the Argentine Government at a time of war at 

 home and abroad, and to the uniform sympathy and courtesy of a people strange to his modes 

 of life and thought. While the extent to which these relations were aided by his Freemasonry 

 must remain a matter of conjecture, that they were not its sole end and purpose is shown by 

 his subsequent career at home where an admiring commentator notes with marked approval 

 that " he served his lodge from its humblest office to the highest. " He received with much pleasure 

 his complimentary election to the thirty-third degree of the Scottish Rite, became deputy 

 grand master of the grand lodge of Massachusetts, and declined to become a candidate for the 

 office of grand master of the same lodge only because he felt himself ill adapted to the office. 

 This lack of adaptation was doubtless because public speech was a burden to him and was 

 undertaken only under compulsion. As a lad he had not been permitted to "speak his piece" 

 at the college commencement "for lack of rhetorical ability," and his masonic brother notes 

 with perhaps a touch of glee, as one who had caught great Jove nodding, "his rare and diffident 

 attempts to speak in lodge * * * anything less oratorical can not well be imagined." 



Gould's relation to his assistants and his feeling for them is illustrated in the following 

 condensed excerpts from an unpublished letter of February, 1884, which also brings into relief 

 his own strong convictions of immortality: "A flash of lightning took from us one of the finest 

 and noblest young men I ever knew, Chalmers W. Stevens, one of my mainstays whom I loved 

 as a younger brother or son, and whose devotion to the work has been intense. I had promised 

 him six months leave of absence and in May he was to start. Yesterday we buried him in the 

 Protestant Cemetery lately opened here. The concourse was very large for he was a universal 



