8 CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON. 



Prof. Lewis Boss was born at Providence, Rhode Island, October 26, 

 1846, and died at Albany, New York, October 5, 1912. His preliminary 

 education was obtained in public and private schools of Rhode Island and 

 New Hampshire, and he was graduated from Dartmouth College in 1870. 

 His attention was early directed to the science of astronomy, and soon after 

 leaving college he obtained a position in the United States Land Office at 

 Washington, where he soon came into association with the astronomers of 

 the United States Naval Observatory and the Nautical Almanac Office. On 

 the organization in 1872 of the Northern Boundary Commission for the 

 fixation of that part of the forty-ninth parallel which defines the boundary 

 between the United States and British America, he accepted the position of 

 civilian astronomer under the officers of the Corps of Engineers, United 

 States Army, delegated to represent the United States on this Commission. 

 His duty in this connection probably led him directly into his life work ; for 

 the necessity of determining latitudes with precision must have quickly re- 

 vealed to his mind the nearly total lack at that time of catalogues giving 

 accurate positions of stars suitable for observation in the determination of 

 geographical positions with field instruments. At any rate, he made haste 

 to prepare a catalogue for the special needs of the Boundary Commission, 

 and the greater part of his time and energy was thereafter devoted to this 

 fundamental branch of astronomical research. The catalogue just men- 

 tioned was completed early in 1877 and appeared as an appendix to the re- 

 port of the Commission published by the Department of State. This cata- 

 logue gave positions (in declination) for only 500 stars, but it set a new 

 standard of precision, a standard surpassed only recently by Boss himself. 

 While engaged in this work he was appointed director of the Dudley Obser- 

 vatory, Albany, New York, and professor of astronomy in Union University, 

 positions which he held from 1876 to the time of his death. 



During this interval of thirty-six years he pursued with rare continuity 

 and unequaled productivity the work of meridian astrometry, for which the 

 Dudley Observatory is specially equipped. He found time, however, for no 

 small amount of attention to allied fields of work, serving as a member of 

 the government eclipse expedition sent to Colorado to observe the solar 

 eclipse of 1878; taking charge of a party sent to Chili by the United States 

 Transit of Venus Commission to observe the transit of the planet Venus 

 across the sun's disk in December 1882; serving the State of New York as 

 superintendent of weights and measures for many years ; and more recently 

 acting as editor of the Astronomical Journal. In the meantime he joined in 

 a cooperative effort (originating with the German Astronomical Society) to 

 map accurately all of the brighter stars by dividing the celestial sphere into 

 zones and assigning these respectively to the various observatories ade- 

 quately equipped for this work. He was one of the earliest to complete a 

 zone and his catalogue of positions of 8241 stars was published at Leipzig 

 in 1890. In the meantime also the magnitude and the importance of in- 

 creased precision in the determination of stellar positions grew with every 



