76 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 



ing from an article published at that time by the eminent geometer 

 who now retires from the position of President of this Association. 

 He will forgive me the liberty for the sake of the illustration. 

 ' The impossibility,' said he, ' of great national progress in as- 

 tronomy, while the materials are, for the most part, imported, can 

 hardly need to be impressed upon the patrons of science in this 

 country. * * * And next to the support of observers is the 

 establishment of observatories. Something has been done for this 

 purpose in various parts of the country, and it is earnestly to be 

 hoped that the intimations which we have heard regarding the in- 

 tentions of Government may prove to be well founded ; that we 

 shall soon have a permanent national observatory equal in its ap- 

 pointments to the best furnished ones of Europe ; and that Ameri- 

 can ships will ere long calculate their longitudes and latitudes from 

 an American nautical almanac. That there is on this side of the 

 Atlantic a sufficient capacity for celestial observations is amply 

 attested by the success which has attended the efforts, necessarily 

 humble which have hitherto been made.'"* 



XVI. 



Just before the middle of the century a wave, or to speak more 

 accurately, a series of weaves of intellectual activity began to pass 

 over Europe and America. There was a renaissance, quite as 

 important as that which occurred in Europe at the close of the 

 Middle Ages. Draper and other historians have pointed out the 

 causes of this movement, prominent among which were the in- 

 troduction of steam and electricity, annihilating space and 

 relieving mankind from a great burden of mechanical drudgery. 

 It was the beginning of the " age of science," and political as well 

 as social and industrial changes followed in rapid succession. 



In Europe the great work began a little earlier. Professor 

 Huxley, in his address to the Royal Society in 1SS5, took for a 

 fixed point his own birthday in 1S35, which ^as four months 

 before the completion of the railway between Stockton and 

 Darlington — " the ancestral representative of the vast reticulated 

 fetching and carrying organism which now extends its meshes 

 over the civilized world." Since then, he remarked, " the greater 



* Peirce, Benjamin, Cambridge Miscellanj-, 1842, p. 25. 



