46 MATTHEW FONTAINE MAURY 



However scantily informed Maury may have been in 

 the beginning as to the great advance in astronomical 

 science recently made in Europe, his great energy and 

 native ability soon enabled him to overcome any such 

 handicaps. He assisted with his own hands in the in- 

 stallation of the instruments, in which he took great 

 delight, writing that the Great Refraction Circle was 

 such an exquisite piece of machinery and so beautiful that 

 he would like to wear it round his neck as an ornament. 

 He was constantly endeavoring to secure better and 

 larger instruments, and wrote with pride when the 

 Observatory, as far as equipment was concerned, became 

 the second most important in the world and needed only 

 a larger telescope to make it the very first of all. Maury 

 quickly saw the value of the Electro-Chronograph, in- 

 vented by John Locke of Cincinnati, in determining 

 longitude with the aid of the magnetic telegraph, seeing 

 that it would practically double the number of observa- 

 tions that one observer could make; and it was largely 

 through him that Congress was persuaded to appropriate 

 the $10,000 necessary for installing the instrument at 

 the Observatory. 



Maury was, moreover, by no means a mere figurehead 

 in the making of astronomical observations, but soon 

 mastered the details of this work which might have been 

 left wholly to his subordinates. During the first two 

 years he was the principal observer with the equatorial, 

 and it is interesting to note how often his name appears 

 as the observer in the published extracts from the note- 

 books of the Observatory. That he had much more 

 than a mere passing interest in astronomy is evident 

 from the following account of his emotions during an 

 astronomical observation: ''To me the simple passage 



