AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 107 



of the doings of our real men of science are either overlooked 

 entirely, disregarded or named to be treated with disrespect. This, 

 too, from those who once professed to be amongst the most devoted 

 of the admirers of Arago, and, under his lead, to cultivate friend- 

 ships which might almost be termed sentimental with our savans. 

 " Write to me," said one of these distinguished men to one of our 

 friends, " at the equinoxes, and I will answer at the solstices." 

 " I wrote," said the American, " at the equinoxes, hut the solstices 

 have never come." True, there are cases of exception, which, 

 according to the law maxim, prove the rule. Not to indulge in 

 generalities, I state, after full examination, that the methods 

 recently advanced by Le Verrier, a man who of many, has no 

 need to slight the claims of others, for determining diflferences of 

 longitude by the telegraph, are but the reproduction of those 

 used in the coast survey of the United States for now these eight 

 years, the fruits of the labors and studies of Walker and Loomis, 

 Gould and others. Neither the method of coincidences which he 

 lauds, nor that of signalizing the transits of stars, which he con- 

 siders of the highest merit, are new, but have been practised for 

 years, and have been published over and over in official reports 

 and in the proceedings of recognized scientific bodies, and consti- 

 tute in part what may properly be called the American method 

 of telegraphic longitudes. The astronomer royal of Great Britain 

 in a far diiferent spirit has given to the automatic register of 

 astronomical observations by the galv^anic circuit, the title which 

 generously recognizes our claims, and assigns the origin to the 

 United States, in the title of American method of observation. 



A lesser light, too, of the old world, Wichmann, of Konigsberg, 

 has just published an article on the difference of longitude by 

 telegraph, stimulated by that of Le Verrier, and containing an 

 outline of his mode of proceeding, which might almost serve as a 

 history of the olden time method of the coast survey. 



Better things than this were to be expected from a German 

 physicist. They, of all Europeans, have, in former days, been 

 sore under the infliction of the egotism or neglect of the French 

 physicists; and I remember well the unction with which the story 

 was told me by one of those men who read all languages, that 



