X OBITUARY NOTICES. 



five sons and two daughters, born to George Waldo and Charlotte 

 Colgate Abbe. Three of his brothers and his two sisters still survive 

 him. His ancestry on both sides was of pure English stock of 

 liberty-loving English and Huguenot emigration. His Colonial an- 

 cestor, John Abbe, was born in England about 1613 and settled in 

 Salem, Mass., about 1635. Professor Abbe's father was prominent 

 in the mercantile and charitable affairs of New York at a time when 

 public schools were rare and the city was primitive enough for Abbe 

 and his boyhood companions to gather shells on Battery beach. 

 His early education was gained in private schools, later in the David 

 B. Scott Grammar School, No. 40, on 20th Street. From this he 

 entered the New York Free Academy, now the College of the City 

 of New York, in 1851. After making an honorable record in mathe- 

 matics and the sciences he graduated in 1857, taking, as he says, 

 "the year 1853 over again to my great advantage as a student." 



Inspired by his parents with a love of nature, his predilections 

 for scientific pursuits followed naturally, and after graduation his 

 progress toward his life work was rapid and consistent. While 

 teaching mathematics in Trinity Latin School and later in Ann 

 Arbor, Mich., he further perfected his own education in astronomy, 

 spending four years at Cambridge, Mass., in association with Dr. B. 

 A. Gould and assisting in the telegraphic longitude work of the 

 United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. The two years, 1865 

 and 1866, were spent delightfully at the great Russian observatory 

 at Pulkova, then under the illustrious Otto Struve. Here, under 

 new laws of the autocratic Russian Empire, a few young men of 

 civilian rank, while at liberty to devote their whole time to their 

 own studies, were nevertheless permitted to participate if they so 

 desired in some of the regular work of the observatory, for which 

 a small compensation was allowed. The years of his happy asso- 

 ciations and congenial work at this great institution remained there* 

 after a delightful and vivid memory to him, to which he always re- 

 ferred with sympathy and feeling. 



A little incident serves to show the warmth of the hospitality 

 which greeted him and also goes far to explain the mystic charm 

 seeming to surround these impressionable years of his early life. It 

 seems his arrival at Pulkova occurred at about Christmas time. 



