SAMUEL PIERPONT LAXGLEY.'' 



By Cyrus Adlek. 



Samuel Pierpont Langley, the third secretary of the Smithsonian 

 Institution, astronomer and jihysicist, famed the world ov'er for 

 epoch-making contributions to our knowledge of the sun and the 

 establishment of the principles of aerial flight. i)assed away in his 

 seventy-second year, at Aiken. S. C. on the '21ih of February, lOOC). 



Mr. Langley was descended of families which came to Massachu- 

 setts in the early part of the seventeenth century, and to a great extent 

 remained in the colony and even in the State itself. In a biography 

 prepared by the late George Brown Goode eleven years ago, it Avas 

 pointed out that an unusual number of his ancestors w^ere skilled 

 mechanics and artisans, while on the other hand a group of them 

 Avere of the most intellectual men of early Xew England — clergymen, 

 schoolmasters, and indeed one of them. Increase Mather, a president 

 of Harvard College and the author of the first American work on 

 astronomy. 



His immediate forbears were especially characterized by great physi- 

 cal and intellectual vigor. Avide cultivation, and a staunch sense of 

 duty; and if to these distinguishing characteristics of a long line of 

 ancestors there be added mechanical skill, high moral ideals, and a 

 restless, all-consuming pursuit of new truth, in season and out of 

 season, by skillful methods, upon original lines, we have a picture of 

 the intellectual and moral make-up of the man whose life I am now 

 attempting, inadequately, to portray. 



He beguiled the tedium of his last illness by beginning the prepara- 

 tion of his memoirs, Avhich I have been permitted to see. They are 

 so fragmentary that they can never be published, but from them I 

 have been able to learn a few incidents of his earh^ life Avhich it is 

 not improper to recite. 



He Avas born on the 22d of August, 1834, in Vernon street, Eox- 

 bury, to Samuel Langley and Mar}' Williams; attended various pri- 

 vate schools, and later entered the Boston High School. His educa- 



« Read before the Pliilosophical Society of Washington, November 24, 1906. 

 lieprintecl from Bulletin of the Society, Vol. XV, pp. 1-26. 



515 



