68 
form Standard of Weights and Measures, of a Naval Acad- 
emy, a Nautical Almanac, anda National University. But 
these recommendations were treated with neglect by Con- 
gress; although time has written a sufficient commentary on 
their wisdom and foresight. An excellent report on the 
subject, advocating the views of the President, was made by 
Mr. C. F. Mercer, chairman of the Committee of the House, 
to whom, in the ordinary routine, the subject was referred 
but the recommendations of the President, and of the Com- 
mittee, were suffered to lie unnoticed on the tables of both 
Houses ; and it was reserved for the Emperor Nicholas of 
Russia to follow those counsels which party rancor pre- 
cluded the Congress of the United States from adopting on 
the recommendation of their President, and by the estab- 
lishment of the noblest Observatory of the world to render 
the capital of his empire a capital of astronomical science.” 
The first structure in the United States which might claim 
the name of a fixed Astronomical Observatory was the ill- 
constructed little edifice of which I have already spoken, 14 
feet long, 13 feet broad, and 10 feet high, in which Gilliss . 
industriously labored for nearly four years, making the 
excellent observations of right-ascension already described, 
and furnishing the first volume of astronomical observations 
published in this hemisphere, and probably a more precise 
record of transits than has ever been made in America by 
any other person. 
In 1838, the year in which Lieutenant Gilliss commenced 
his observations, a small astronomical structure had been 
built at the Western Reserve College, in Hudson, Ohio, 
_ through the exertions of Professor Elias Loomis, and 
eae wert with a 4-inch equatorial telescope and a 3-inch 
a. , both of English manufacture. With these 
or Loomis made a number of astronomical obser- 
