BENJAMIN APTHORP GOULD. 355 



BENJAMIN APTHORP GOULD. 



Benjamin Aptiiokp Gould was born on September 27, 1824, at 

 No. 5 Wiuthrop Place, Boslou. The years of bis preparatory education 

 were passed at the Chauncy Hall and Boston Latin Schools. He grad- 

 uated from Harvard College in lS4i. It is interesting to note, as evi- 

 dence of his wonderful versatility of miud, and in view of the subsequent 

 choice of a career which has made his name so illustrious in the annals 

 of science, that, although he attained in college high distinction in mathe- 

 matical and physical branches, the earliest studies of his predilection 

 were classical rather than scientific. After leaving collese he took 

 charge of the Boston Latin School. At the end of a year, however, his 

 intellectual energies took their final direction towards science. What 

 were the springs of the influence which turned him to astronomy, and 

 bow long the impulse had been gathering force, cannot now be told, but 

 the passionate devotion with which he entered upon this career, and the 

 tenacity with which he held to it, — at times under circumstances of ex- 

 treme discouragement which never caused him to falter or swerve from 

 his purpose, — are characteristic of the man. This initial decision of a 

 young man of twenty-one, as we look back upon it from a point where 

 we can measure the results that have flowed from it, seems not so much 

 an episode in an individual career as an epoch in our national scientific 

 history. For the date, Jul}', 1845, when Gould placed his foot upon 

 the steamer from Boston, with the avowed and definite purpose to devote 

 himself to a life purely of scientific research, marks quite distinctly a 

 most important phase in American astronomy. Up to that time the in- 

 stance of a man doing this as his only earthly aim, while unassured of a 

 professor's chair or other similar appointment, and not as a means of 

 livelihood, was in this country absolutely unknown. With a steadiness of 

 purpose singular in so young a man, he pursued diligently the oppor- 

 tunity he had himself created, for three years at the fountain-heads of 

 astronomical learning. Beginning his life of preparation, study, and 

 work with Airy at Greenwich, he then went to Paris. But it was after- 

 wards, in Germany, that he secured his true education in the regenerated 

 methods of modern astronomical research ; at Berlin, where he spent a 

 year with Eucke ; at Altona, Pulkowa, and Gotha, under Peters, Struve, 

 and Hansen ; and at Gottingen, where for a year he was a pupil of 

 Gauss, and where he took his Doctorate of Philosophy at the University 

 in 1848. He then returned home, full of early honors and flushed 

 with lofty hopes and honorable ambitions. 



