198 CONGRESSIONAL PROCEEDINGS. 



The committee will add, that at no period of human history has the 

 general impulse of the learned world been more intensely directed to 

 the cultivation of this science than in the present age. It was an 

 observation of Voltaire that if the whole human race could be assembled 

 in one mass from the creation of man to his time, in the graduation of 

 genius among them all, Isaac Newton would stand at their head. But 

 the discoveries of Newton were the results of calculations founded 

 upon the observations of others — of Copernicus, of Tycho Brahe, of 

 Kepler, of Flamsteed; and among their producing causes, not the 

 least was the erection and establishment of the royal observatory of 

 Greenwich. 



The original purpose of this institution, first commenced in 1676, 

 under the patronage of Charles II, and the most glorious incident of 

 his life, was for the finding out the so much desired longitudes of 

 places for the perfecting the art of navigation; and the inscription 

 still existing above the original door of the observatory declares that 

 it was built for the benefit of astronomy and navigation; so intimately 

 connected together are the abstract science and the practical art that 

 without the help of the astronomer the seaman could not urge his bark 

 in safety one inch beyond the sight of the shore. 



The discovery of the longitudes of places, the benefit of astronomy 

 and navigation, were thus the declared objects of the erecting of the 

 Greenwich Observatory, and of the appointment, in the person of 

 Flamsteed, of an astronomical observator with a salary of one hundred 

 pounds sterling a year, leaving him to provide himself with all the 

 instruments and books necessary for the performance of his duties. 

 And what were the first fruits of this institution? (1) An increased 

 accuracy of observation, by the attachment of telescopes to graduated 

 instruments, and by the use of a clock to note the time at which stars 

 and planets passed, by their apparent diurnal motion, across the mid- 

 dle of the field of view of the telescope. (2) A catalogue of the places 

 of 3,310 stars, with a name affixed to each of them, the selection and 

 nomenclature of which have served as the basis to every catalogue 

 since that time. Nor is it an uninteresting incident in the progressive 

 history of astronomical knowledge that when, 100 years later, Herschel 

 discovered that the star which bears his name was a planet, he found 

 it as a fixed star upon the catalogue of Flamsteed. (3) Many of 

 Flamsteed's observations of the moon, reduced as well as was then 

 practicable, were, at Newton's request, communicated to him, to aid 

 in perfecting the theory deduced from the principle of universal grav- 

 itation. "The time," as has been well observed by the present astron- 

 omer royal, the Reverend George Biddell Airy, "the time at which 

 these observations were made was a most critical one — when the most 

 accurate observations that had been made were needed for the support 

 of the most extensive philosophical theory that man had invented." 



