SAMUElv PIERPONT LANGLEY. q 



good academic education, including a large admixture of Latin 

 grammar, which probably did much to train his boyish judgment. 



Noteworthy, in the sketch which he wrote during the last hours 

 of his life, is the statement that his father, a wholesale merchant in 

 Boston, owned a telescope and that with this the boy roamed among 

 the starry hosts and also watched the building of the Bunker Hill 

 Monument. From his childhood he devoured books of all sorts ; loved 

 art; traveled, in spirit, through foreign lands; reflected much and 

 curiously on his reading and on the world about him, but concen- 

 trated his studies mainly upon mathematics. . 



Under the early necessity of looking to his livelihood, he did not 

 enter college, but studied civil engineering and architecture in ways 

 most accessible to him, these professions best according with his 

 tastes and aims. 



At the age of twenty-three he went westward, and spent the next 

 seven years mainly in Chicago and St. Louis, devoted to his pro- 

 fession and successful in it, thereby gaining a modest competence, 

 with business training and a skill in drafting which proved of great 

 value in his later career, scientific and administrative. 



In 1864, at the age of thirty, he definitely abandoned his profes- 

 sion and, having returned to New England, spent some time in 

 building telescopes — several refractors, and finally a reflector — wiiich 

 took his spare time for three years. Later, with his brother, John 

 Williams Langley, he gave something more than a year to European 

 travel, visiting, especially, scientific institutions, observatories, and 

 galleries of art, thus showing the trend of his tastes, which there- 

 after steadil}- turned toward astronomy as a profession and toward 

 the fine arts as a pleasure. During this journey he gained a good 

 knowledge of the continental languages, especially of French, in 

 which he finally acquired notable proficiency as a reader, writer, and 

 speaker. 



Upon his return he seems to have assumed a position in American 

 science in a way at first sight mysterious. He had as yet not pub- 

 lished anything of note; had not made himself known in the uni- 

 versities; had made no popular addresses; had not pushed himself 

 into notice in any way; yet there was in him something which 

 attracted strong leaders in science, inspired respect, won confidence, 

 and secured him speedy advancement. 



His promotion was rapid. First, to an assistant's place in the 

 Harvard Observatory; two years afterward, to a professorship of 

 mathematics and the practical direction of the observatory at An- 

 napolis, and less than a year later, at the age of thirty-two, to the 



