EDWARD CHARLES PICKERING. 503 



Physics which did much to make the Institute of Technology famous 

 and has since been accepted and adopted universally as an indis- 

 pensable method of instruction in that subject. To the laboratory 

 which he had organized and built up the Corporation of the Institute 

 in 1872 at his suggestion gave the name Rogers Laboratory of Physics 

 and the additional title of Director of the Laboratory was conferred 

 upon him. 



In the autumn of 1876 he was called to become the Director of the 

 Harvard College Observatory, and accepting this invitation he entered 

 upon the duties of the position in February, 1877. His selection by 

 President Eliot seemed at the time a radical innovation for Professor 

 Pickering was a physicist rather than an astronomer of the old school. 

 However, the appointment was justified for it presaged the trend of 

 the New Astronomy along the lines of Physics, a development in which 

 Professor Pickering has borne a most honorable part. 



As Director of the Observatory he showed great administrative 

 ability and secured a large financial support for his projects, the en- 

 dowment growing from a few hundred thousand to a million dollars. 



Instead of venturing into the realm of speculative and picturesque 

 astronomy, he was content to be what he called himself " a collector of 

 astronomical facts," the interpretation of which he was perfectly 

 willing to leave to the future. The posthumous value of the work of 

 such men as Herschel and Argelander appealed especially to him and 

 shaped the large investigations that he undertook, whose importance 

 could not be completely revealed perhaps for centuries. 



Immediately upon his appointment to his new position, Professor 

 Pickering chose as his particular field of labor the photometry of the 

 stars. Soon after the introduction of the dry plate, in general photo- 

 graphy, he was led to investigate its applicability to the study of the 

 stars and their spectra in which work he was a pioneer. He also 

 realized the great value of the objective prism in stellar spectroscopy 

 and made constant use of it in his studies of stellar spectra. 



The Observatory under Professor Pickering has made its largest 

 contribution to astronomy in four fields. 



(1) Photometry. With the , aid of the meridian photometer in- 

 vented by him, he devised a scale of photometric magnitudes, deter- 

 mining these for eighty thousand stars upon a basis of more than two 

 million observations. 



