70 A CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN ASTRONOMY. 



father possessed a small hand telescope, with 

 which young Schmidt commenced his lunar 

 studies. Appointed assistant at Bonn and 

 Olmtitz and director at Athens successively, 

 he kept up his persistent study of the surface 

 of the Moon for over forty years. In 1839, 

 when fourteen years of age, he began the valu- 

 able series of observations which were destined 

 to form the basis of his great chart of the sur- 

 face of the Moon. Between 1853 and 1858, 

 when employed at Olmtitz, Schmidt made and 

 calculated no fewer than 4000 micrometrical 

 measures of the altitudes of lunar mountains. 

 Before 1866 Schmidt had found no fewer than 

 278 " rills," and his discoveries were the means of 

 augmenting the number of these curious objects 

 to nearly a thousand. 



In a word, it may be said that Schmidt drew 

 out a lunar geography, and the result of his 

 labours, together with those of Schroter and 

 Madler, is that in a sense we now know the 

 features of the Moon better than those of the 

 Earth. For instance, astronomers see the whole 

 surface of the Moon spread before their eyes, 

 while geographers can never have a similar 

 view of the terrestrial features : we have never 

 seen the poles of the Earth, while the lunar 

 poles are well known to astronomers. For 



