70 SIMON NEWCOMB 



as to-day. He who is leaving the stage feels that he has only 

 begun, and must leave his successors with more to do than 

 his predecessors left him. 



To us an interesting feature of this progress is the part 

 taken in it by our own country. The science of our day, it 

 is true, is of no country. Yet we very appropriately speak 

 of American science from the fact that our traditional reputa- 

 tion has not been that of a people deeply interested in the 

 higher branches of intellectual work. Men yet living can 

 remember when in the eyes of the universal church of learn- 

 ing all cisatlantic countries, our own included, were partes 

 infidelium. 



Yet American astronomy is not entirely of our genera- 

 tion. In the middle of the last century Professor Winthrop, 

 of Harvard, was an industrious observer of eclipses and kin- 

 dred phenomena, whose work was recorded in the transactions 

 of learned societies. But the greatest astronomical activity 

 during our colonial period was that called out by the transit 

 of Venus in 1769, which was visible in this country. A com- 

 mittee of the American Philosophical society, at Philadelphia, 

 organized an excellent system of observations, which we 

 now know to have been fully as successful, perhaps more so, 

 than the majority of those made on other continents, owing 

 mainly to the advantages of air and climate. Among the 

 observers was the celebrated Rittenhouse, to whom is due 

 the distinction of having been the first American astronomer 

 whose work has an important place in the history of the 

 science. In addition to the observations which he has left 

 us, he was the first inventor or proposer of the collimating 

 telescope, an instrument which has become almost a necessity 

 wherever accurate observations are made. The fact that 

 the subsequent invention by Bessel was quite independent 

 does not detract from the merits of either. 



Shortly after the transit of Venus, which I have men- 

 tioned, the war of the revolution commenced. The genera- 

 tion which carried on that war and the following one, which 

 framed our constitution and laid the basis of our political 

 institutions, were naturally too much occupied with these 

 great problems to pay much attention to pure science. While 



