12 REPORT OF THE SECRETARY. 



with SO sudden an illness that he was unable to sign it. In view of 

 these circumstances and after careful deliberation upon the matter, the 

 Regents decided to accept as finally and decisively indicative of the 

 wishes of the testator the provisions of this codicil bequeathing $5,000 

 for the i)urpose of an astro-physical observatory, and this sum was 

 therefore paid by Dr. Kidder's executor to the Institution. 



A further sum of $5,000 was likewise generously presented by Dr. 

 Alexander Graham Bell to the writer individually for the prosecution 

 of the researches in astro-physics, to which he has devoted much of his 

 life, but it has seemed proper to him, under the circumstances, that this 

 sum should be placed to the credit of the Smithsonian Institution upon 

 the same footing as the Kidder bequest, and with the consent of the 

 donor it has been so transferred. I am therefore desirous of here ex- 

 pressing my own personal as well as my official obligation to Dr. Bell 

 for this gift for the increase of knowledge. 



The initial step for the establishment of an astro-physical observa- 

 tory under the National Government thus having been taken by private 

 individuals, it is hoped that Congress will see fit to place it upon a firm 

 footing and to make a small annual provision for its maintenance. And 

 it seems proper to mention that the field of research to which such a 

 department of the Institution would be devoted has been considered of 

 sufficient importance by the legislators of leading foreign nations to 

 justify the erection of costly special observatories and to provide for 

 their maintenance with a staff of astronomers and physicists of wide 

 reputation. 



The class of work here specially referred to does not ordinarily in- 

 volve the use of the telescope, and is quite distinct from that carried 

 on at any observatory in this country. It would in no way conflict with 

 the work of the present U. S. Naval Observatory, beiog in a field of 

 work that the latter has never entered. 



Briefly stated, the work for which the older Government observa- 

 tories at Greenwich, Paris, Berlin, and Washington were founded, and 

 in which they are for the most part now engaged, is the determination 

 of relative positions of heavenly bodies and of our own place with ref- 

 erence to them. Within the past twenty years, all these Governments 

 but our own have established astro physical observatories, as they are 

 called, that are engaged in the study of the constitution of the heav- 

 enly bodies as distinguished from their positions; in determining, for 

 example, not so much the position of the sun in the sky as the rela- 

 tion that it bears to the earth and to our own daily wants ; how it effects 

 terrestrial climate; and how it may best be studied for the purposes 

 of the meteorologist, and so on ; and it is an observatory of the latter 

 kind that the donors just mentioned appear to have had prominently 

 in N^ew, and which it is proposed to conduct (though on an extremely 

 modest scale) under the auspices of the Institution. 



In connection with this renewed revival in the line of physical re- 



