454 Memorial of George Broivii Coode. 



a single establishment provided with the means of making an absolute determina. 

 tion of the place of any celestial body, or even relative determinations at all com- 

 mensurate in accuracy with the demands of the times. The only instrument that 

 could be thought of for the purpose was the Yale-College telescope, which, although 

 provided with a micrometer, was destitute of the means of identifying comparison — 

 stars. A better idea of American astronomy a dozen years ago can hardly be obtained 

 than by quoting from an article published at that time by the eminent geometer 

 who now retires from the position of President of this Association. He will forgive 

 me the liberty, for the sake of the illustration. " The impossibilit)^" said he, " of 

 great national progress in Astronomy while the materials are for the most part 

 imported can hardly need to be impressed upon the patrons of science in this coun- 

 tr}'. . . . And next to the support of observers is the establishment of observa- 

 tories. vSomething has been done for this purpose in various parts of the country, 

 and it is earnestly to be hoped that the intimations which we have heard regarding 

 the intentions of government may prove to be well founded ; — that we shal] soon 

 have a permanent national observatory equal in its appointments to the best fur- 

 nished ones of Europe ; and that American ships will ere long calculate their longi- 

 tudes and latitudes from an American nautical almanac. That there is on this side 

 of the Atlantic a sufficient capacity for celestial observations is amply attested by 

 the success which has attended the efforts, necessarily humble, which have hitherto 

 been made. ' ' ' 



XVI. 



Just before the middle of the century a wave, or, to speak more accu- 

 rately, a series of waves, of intellectual activity began to pass over 

 Europe and America. There was a renaissance quite as important as 

 that which occurred in Europe at the close of the middle ages. Draper 

 and other historians have pointed out the causes of this movement, prom- 

 inent among which were the introduction of steam and electricity, anni- 

 hilating space and relieving mankind from a great burden of mechanical 

 drudgery. It was the beginning of the "age of science," and political 

 as well as social and industrial changes followed in rapid succession. 



In Europe the great work began a little earlier. Professor Huxley, 

 in his address to the Royal Society in 1885, took for a fixed point his 

 own birthday in 1825, which was four months before the completion of 

 the railway between Stockton and Darlington — "the ancestral represent- 

 ative of the vast reticulated fetching and carrying organism which 

 now extends its meshes over the civilized world." 



Since then, [he remarked,] the greater part of the vast body of knowledge which 

 constitutes the modern sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, and geology has 

 been acquired, and the widest generalizations therefrom have been deduced, and, 

 furthermore, the majority of those applications of scientific knowledge to practical 

 ends which have brought about the most striking differences l)etween our present 

 civilization and that of antiquity have been made within that period of time. 



It is within the past half century, he continued, that the most brilliant 

 additions have been made to fact and theory and serviceable hypothesis 

 in the region of pure science, for within this time falls the establishment 



'Benjamin Peirce, Cambridge Miscellany, April, 1S42, p. 25. 



