182 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1916. 



interi'upt his study of the planetary motions, nor did Gauss in the 

 invasion of Napoleon. Successive volumes of Mecanique Celeste 

 came out, and bear evidence in their title-pages of the political 

 changes of the French Revolution. Hevelius and Gassendi corre- 

 sponded across a Europe in turmoil, and Newcomb worked with De- 

 launay at the theory of the moon while the Paris Commune raged 

 almost to the doors of the observatory. Had science always waited 

 to advance till times were quiet, it would have remained to this day 

 uncommonly near to its starting point. 



The subject to which I ask your attention for an hour to-night 

 is not a small one. It is nothing less than the simplest compre- 

 hensive view of the whole universe. Indeed, it is a subject so vast 

 that some have felt that in the study of it human interests would 

 shrivel away and that as we looked steadily upon its extension we 

 should be gripped with a kind of nightmare and feel ourselves shrink- 

 ing and shrinking, and unless by violent effort we could throw it 

 off we should seem in risk of vanishing altogether. But somehow 

 that is not the case. Those who most study the matter and those 

 who have lately contributed most to our knowledge are men well 

 known to us, very human beings. Certainly a correct conception of 

 the universe must govern the scale of ultimate values of all we do; 

 but in the history of ideas it is remarkable that interest in it has for 

 the most part of the time been satisfied with obvious fairy tales, has, 

 in fact, been limited to the very narrow outlook of what we might 

 immediately expect to accomplish, and has often combined in indi- 

 viduals an intense interest in the question, Avith a total disregard of 

 any but the individual's point of view, as if even the " vasty halls " 

 of cosmogony were an arena of sport, where the attempt Avas not so 

 much to reach the goal as to gain a place for self-expression. As 

 president for the time being of the Royal Astronomical Society, I 

 keep a certain amount of involuntary touch with such people. " I 

 should like to know, sir," one of these wrote to me severely the other 

 day, " what steps are being taken to spread the true chronology and 

 the truth about the deluge." 



Well, perhaps that gentleman was a paradoxer; but it is interest- 

 ing to bestow a side glance upon the way astronomy has been viewed 

 by acute and catholic minds before the era when the commonplaces 

 of diffused education had blunted a good many first-hand judgments. 

 I shall not take you on a long excursion into history. Tavo or three 

 pregnant examples will suffice. 



Take Bacon's New Atlantis. In that remarkable country, Avhich 

 had flying men and submarines and scientific stockbreeding for the 

 production of definite variations, it is true that they had a statue to 

 " the inventor of observations of astronomy," but the systematic con- 



