APPENDICES 369 



expressly stating however that this letter is not intended to restrict the action of the 

 Board of Directors more than shall in their judgment be expedient and fitting. 



First. My object in creating the Fund is two-fold; on the one hand to advance the 

 science of astronomy, and on the other to honor my father's memory and to insure that his 

 power to accomplish scientific work shall not end with his own life. 



Second. Throughout my father's lifetime his patriotic feeling and scientific ambition were 

 closely associated, and I wish therefore that a fund bearing his name should be used 

 primarily for the benefit of investigators in his own country or of his own nationality. I 

 recognize however that sometimes the best possible service to American science is the 

 maintenance of close communion between the scientific men of Europe and of America and 

 that therefore even while acting in the spirit of the above restriction it may occasionally 

 be best to apply this money to the aid of a foreign investigator working abroad. 



In connection with this I must refer to the strong interest felt by my father in the 

 National Academy of Sciences, and to his belief in the importance of creating and maintain- 

 ing a single national scientific body whose preeminence should be unquestionable, and of 

 concentrating power in its hands. I wish to recommend that all three Directors shall be 

 members of the Academy, although I have made this legally necessary for only two of the 

 three, and to record the desire to serve the Academy so far as I am able as one of my minor 

 motives in creating the Trust. 



Third. I have copied many of the provisions of the Bache Fund, and it is my hope that 

 the Boards of Direction of the two Funds may always act in friendly unison, as befits the 

 long and intimate friendship of the men whose work they perpetuate. I trust that the 

 new Fund may relieve the Bache Directors of many astronomical expenses, and thus enable 

 them to devote the same amounts of money to other branches of science. And I recommend 

 the adoption of a custom now followed by the Bache Board of Directors, by which each 

 Director upon his own election names to his colleagues the person whom he believes most 

 fit to succeed him. 



Fourth. I wish that in all cases work in the Astronomy of Precision should be distinctly 

 preferred to any work in Astrophysics, both because of my father's personal preference 

 and because of the present existence of generous endowments for Astrophysics. 



Fifth. The Astronomical Journal long conducted by my father has in my belief exerted 

 a powerful influence in raising the standard of American astronomy; and in case at some 

 future time its existence should be imperiled by lack of funds, I wish to recommend it to 

 the attention of the then Board of Directors. As however I believe that the granting to 

 any scientific journal of definite rights over such a Fund would be a dangerous precedent, 

 I here repeat that the Directors are not to consider themselves bound by these my present 

 wishes further than they deem appropriate in connection with a journal associated with 

 my father's name. 



Sixth. The Benjamin Apthorp Gould fund is intended for the advancement and not 

 for the diffusion of scientific knowledge. Moreover I prefer that it should be used to defray 

 the actual expenses of an investigation rather than for the personal support of the investi- 

 gator during the time of his researches. I do not wish absolutely to exclude the latter im- 

 portant use, but such an employment of funds seems to me more appropriately the function 

 of a university than of the National Academy, and I hope therefore that before granting 

 money for such a purpose the Directors will consider the existing university endowments and 

 other sources of pecuniary aid for able workers in science. 



Finally I wish to express my entire faith in the wise judgment of the first Board of 



Directors and my sense of my own good fortune in being able to intrust a memorial of my 



father to the hands of men who have been both his scientific associates and his intimate 



personal friends. a t> ^ 



'^ Alice Bache Gould. 



Boston, November 17, 1897. 



