SKETCH OF LEWIS MORRIS RUTHERFURD. 405 



College wlien fifteen years old, and was graduated from that insti- 

 tution in 1834. Having studied law with William H. Seward in 

 Auburn, he was admitted to the bar in 1837, and practiced with 

 John Jay, and after his death with Hamilton Fish. His tastes, 

 however, drew him toward the physical sciences. While in col- 

 lege, he had yielded to them, and became assistant to the Profess- 

 ors of Chemistry and Metaphysics in preparing their class lec- 

 tures, and had made pieces of apparatus with his own hands for 

 them ; and having found the scattered parts of an old telescope 

 in the lumber-room of the college laboratory, he had reconstructed 

 the missing pieces and put the whole in order. His own means, 

 to which was afterward added the fortune brought by his wife, 

 made the transition from a life of professional work to one of 

 travel and study and amateur experiment an easy one. During 

 a residence of several years in Europe, he studied optics under 

 Prof. Amici, a famous adept in that science, and acquired knowl- 

 edge which he was destined to put to most fruitful use in after- 

 years. 



After his return home he built upon the lawn of his home at 

 Eleventh Street and Second Avenue, New York, an observatory 

 which has been called the finest and best-equipped private astro- 

 nomical observatory in the country. It had a transit instru- 

 ment, and a refracting telescope with an object-glass eleven and a 

 half inches in diameter, made by Fitz, with a second glass for 

 photographing, corrected by his own new methods and finished 

 by himself ; the seeing lens, when photographs were to be taken, 

 being unscrewed from the tube and the photographing lens being 

 put in its place. A similar instrument was constructed under 

 his direction for Dr. Gould and taken by him to the Argentine 

 Republic, where it is still in use, a portion that was broken dur- 

 ing the voyage having been replaced under Mr. Rutherfurd's 

 directions. 



For use in his own observatory, in place of this instrument, 

 Mr. Rutherfurd made with his own hands an equatorial telescope 

 having an object-glass of thirteen inches aperture. In order to 

 employ it for photography without being compelled to take out 

 the seeing object-glass, he constructed a third lens, which, being 

 placed outside of the ordinary object-glass, converted the telescope 

 into a photographing instrument. The visual focus of this tele- 

 scope was of fifteen feet two inches distance, and its photographic 

 focus of thirteen feet. In this construction he took account of the 

 effect of temperature on the length of the galvanized iron tube. 

 He devised and constructed a measuring machine for measuring 

 the star-plates, arranged to determine the position-angle and dis- 

 tance of every star on a plate from a central star ; and with this 

 had measures made on many of the star-plates, among them the 



