JOHANN FRIEDRICH JULIUS SCHMIDT. 56,5 



cuted work in the various directions in which he was interested 

 until August, 1858, when, after a few mouths' sojourn at Vienna, 

 where he observed in September and October Donati's comet, and in 

 Trieste, he went to Athens, December 15, 1858, where he had been 

 appointed Director of the Observatory. Here, as soon as the condi- 

 tion of the institution permitted, he began the voluminous series of 

 observations, the results of which, published annually in the Astro- 

 nomische Nachrichten, have become so familiar to astronomers, and 

 afford such striking testimony to his industry and zeal. 



Sclimidt seems never to have been attracted to work in the mathe- 

 matical or calculative fields of astronomy ; one or two preliminary 

 orbits of the comets of 1847 and 1848, and of the planet Egeria, being 

 his only published work in this direction. From the start his incli- 

 nation was strongly toward the observation of the physical phenomena 

 of the heavenly bodies, and to this his favorite work he applied him- 

 self with an ardor and unwavering persistence which may be considered 

 among the chief attributes of genius. Hia. enormous industry is 

 remarkable even in this industrious scientific age. The duration of 

 his scientific life was forty-three years, and in this period, with only 

 very moderate instrumental means, and scarcely any assistance, he has 

 accumulated a mass of observation material which seems incompre- 

 hensible to a man of ordinary powers. His work on the moon alone, 

 covering thirty-three years, would have appalled most men. Any one 

 who will attempt to delineate even a very small portion of the lunar 

 surface with an instrument of the size used by Schmidt, and with the 

 amount of detail given by him, will appreciate the task acliieved in his 

 chart of the Lunar Mountains, published in 1878. The drawings and 

 micrometrical measures of various portions of the moon, he accumu- 

 lated for about a quarter of a century before he seriously contemplated 

 forming a general chart. In 1865, he first resolved to lay down all 

 his fragmjCntai-y surveys on a six-foot map, to see what parts had been 

 neglected. In so doing he found how much was wanting, and how 

 little he possessed ; but, nothing daunted, devoted nine years more to 

 the extension and repetition of his observations, and so industriously 

 that his older work became of comparatively little importance. He 

 then determined to conclude the labor and publish what he had already 

 accomplished, as it was manifest that the filling in of all the detail 

 visible in a six-foot refractor would surpass the powers of endurance, 

 and require more than the lifetime, of a single individual. In 1874 he 

 carried his chart to Berlin, and it excited so much interest that the 

 German government undertook its iiublication. In point of com- 



