SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN ASTRONOMY 79 



Chicago. Had this place been suggested to him, I fear he 

 would have replied that were it possible to utilize celestial 

 knowledge in acquiring earthly wealth, here would be the 

 most promising seat for such a school. But he would need 

 to have been a little wiser than his generation to reflect that 

 wealth is at the base of all progress in knowledge and the 

 liberal arts; that it is only when men are relieved from the 

 necessity of devoting all their energies to the immediate wants 

 of life that they can lead intellectual lives, and that we should 

 therefore look to the most enterprising commercial center 

 as the likeliest seat for a great scientific institution. 



Twenty-seven years ago there was in Chicago a modest 

 little instrument which, judged by its size, could not hold up its 

 head with the great ones even of that day. It was the private 

 property of a young man holding no scientific position and 

 scarcely known to the public. And yet that little telescope 

 is to-day among the famous ones of the world, having made 

 memorable advances in the astronomy of double stars, and 

 shown its owner to be a worthy successor of the Herschels 

 and Struves in that line of work. 



A hundred observers might have used the appliances of 

 the Lick observatory for a whole generation without finding 

 the fifth satellite of Jupiter; without successfully photograph- 

 ing the cloud forms of the Milky Way ; without discovering the 

 extraordinar}^ patches of nebulous light, nearly or quite invisi- 

 ble to the human eye, which fill some regions of the heavens. 



In Zurich I paid a visit to the little but not unknown 

 observatory of its famous polytechnic school. The professor 

 of astronomy was especially interested in the observations 

 of the sun with the aid of the spectroscope, and among the 

 ingenious devices which he described, not the least interesting 

 was the method of photographing the sun by special rays of 

 the spectrum, which had been worked out at the Kenwood 

 observatory in Chicago. The Kenwood observatory^ was not, 

 I believe, in the eye of the public one of noteworthy fame, 

 and yet this invention has given it an important place in the 

 science of our day. 



The constitution of the astronomer shows curious and 

 interesting features. If he is destined to advance the science 



