192 ANNUAL EEPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1916. 



sound and brilliant observation is due, has disappeared. No doubt 

 the growth of organization continues to add strength proportionately 

 to the gTeat observatories. I imagine that the number of excellent 

 amateurs to be found at any one time was never large. While we can 

 produce men like Mr. George Higgs or Mr. Franklin- Adams, whom 

 unhappily we have lately lost, or Mr. D'Esterre, who happily is with 

 us, we need not be anxious. Prof. Hale — himself, like Herschel and 

 Gill, an amateur turned professional — once defined an amateur as a 

 man who pureued astronomy because he could not help it. Mr. 

 Franklin-Adams satisfied this test. Sir David Gill tells how, in 

 1903, he came to the Cape with the " incongruous double purpose " 

 of curing the rheumatism and neuritis, which at that time almost 

 incapacitated him, and of photographing the southern heavens. 

 "While the moon shone he retired to the sanatorium at Caledon, and 

 at the end of a fortnight, against the best advice, he would emerge 

 to sit up at nights and expose his plates. He has left the world a 

 great gift and happily has jjlaced it in trust with the best possible 

 hands, those of Greenwich Observatory, and it has been dealt with 

 there as it deserves, with the unassuming mastery that so well be- 

 comes that great house, by the astronomer royal, Mr. Chapman, and 

 Mr. Melotte. We can not dispense with discussion and with theory, 

 and I would be the last to depreciate them, but I think you Avill feel 

 we always owe a special debt of gratitude and affection to the inde- 

 fatigable, the truth-loving race of observers. 



