BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN ASTRONOMY 6i 



France and Germany — Laplace, Lagrange, Legendre, Olbers, 

 Gauss, W. Struve, Bessel — were almost entirely unknown. 



Bowditch's translation of the Mecanique Celeste, and, still 

 more, his extended commentary, brought this monumental 

 work to the attention of students and within their grasp. 

 His Practical Navigator contained the latest and best methods 

 for determining the position of a ship at sea, expressed in 

 siraple rules. American navigators had no superiors in the 

 first half of this century. Nantucket whalers covered the 

 Pacific, Salem ships swarmed in the Indies, and the clipper 

 ships made passages round the Horn to San Francisco, which 

 are a wonder to-day. Part of their success is due to the bold 

 enterprise of their captains (who were said to carry deck loads 

 of studding sail booms to replace those carried away!), but 

 an important part depended on their skill as observers with 

 the sextant. One of the sister ships to the one of which 

 Bowditch was supercargo was visited at Genoa by a European 

 astronomer of note (Baron de Zach), who found that the 

 latest methods of working lunar distances to determine the 

 longitude were known to all on board, sailors as well as officers. 

 His bewilderment reached its climax when the navigator 

 called the negro cook from the galley and bade him expound 

 the methods of determining the longitude to the distinguished 

 visitor. 



On Bowditch's own ship there was a ''crew of twelve 

 men, every one of whom could take and work a lunar obser- 

 vation as well, for all practical purposes, as Sir Isaac Newton 

 himself." Such crews were only to be found on American 

 ships in the palmy days of democracy. All were cousins 

 or neighbors and each had a venture in the voyage. But 

 these anecdotes may serve as illustrations of the intellectual 

 awakening which came about as soon as our young country 

 was reheved from the pressure of the two wars of 1776 and 

 1812. An early visitor. Baron Hyde de Neuville (1805) 

 felt "an unknown something in the air," "a, new wind blow- 

 ing." This new spirit, bom of freedom, entered first into 

 practical life, as was but natural ; science next felt its impulse, 

 and, last of all, literature was bom. Emerson hailed it 

 (in 1837) ''as the sign of an indestructible instinct." "Per- 



