4o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Mr. Loomis, with such means as were at his command, observed 

 its place and computed its orbit. In the same year he computed, 

 from observations of Polaris and of moon culminations, the lati- 

 tude and longitude of the Athenaeum tower — the longitude to 

 within less than two seconds of the best determinations of the 

 present. 



In September, 1838, in a small observatory he had constructed 

 at Hudson, Ohio, he began observations with the instruments — a 

 four-inch equatorial, a transit instrument, and an astronomical 

 clock — which he had bought in Europe. They were made upon 

 culminations and occultations of the moon for longitude, on Po- 

 laris for latitude, and upon five comets for computations of their 

 orbits. A sixth comet was observed by him at Hudson in 1850. 

 These observations were of much greater relative importance in 

 those small days of astronomy in this country, when the facilities 

 we now enjoy did not exist, than they would be now. While Yale 

 College had a telescope but no observatory, and the Williams 

 College Observatory was used for instruction but not for original 

 work, and while Lieutenant Gillis at Washington, and Mr. Bond 

 at Dorchester, Mass., were only preparing to begin observations 

 in connection with the Wilkes Exploring Expedition, there was, 

 as Prof. Loomis said in his inaugural address at Hudson, in 1838, 

 no place in the United States where astronomical observations 

 were regularly and systematically made. A few years later the 

 first telegraph lines had been set up, and the services of Prof. 

 Loomis and Mr. Sears C. Walker were enlisted by Superintendent 

 Bache, of the Coast Survey, in telegraphic determinations m 1847 

 and 1848 — Prof. Loomis having charge of the end of the line at 

 Jersey City and New York — of the differences of longitude of 

 Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Cambridge. In the 

 next summer (1849) Prof. Loomis assisted in a similar work to 

 connect Hudson with Eastern stations. These observations were 

 made from three to five years before telegraphic methods were 

 first used in Europe. 



Prof. Loomis's interest in meteorology, in which his most im- 

 portant work was done, appears to have begun at about the same 

 time his attention was drawn to magnetism and astronomy. 

 He followed the discussions of the rival theories of Mr. Redfield 

 and Prof. Espy, which began about the time of his graduation, 

 and thenceforward made a particular study of the theory of 

 storms. With a set of meteorological instruments bought in 

 Europe he took complete meteorological observations twice a day 

 at Hudson. The examination of the track of a tornado which 

 passed near that place gave him some light respecting the course 

 of the storm- wind and sharpened his desire to learn more about 

 it. He next undertook the discussion of a large storm — that of 



