106 
for the first time officers held glasses of American make, to 
note the running of American log-lines. 
The energies of the Observatory were not merely stimu- 
lated, but became directed by a definite policy in the prose- 
cution of distinct aims. The reduction of the accumulated 
mass of the whole ten, and the greater part of fourteen 
years’ crude observations, was provided for, and plans for 
their publication were matured. The various astronomical 
institutions of the land were invited to systematic co-opera- 
tion for the prosecution of organized schemes of joint activ- 
ity. The long-deferred hope of determining the Parallax by 
simultaneous observations in Chile and in the United States 
was revived, and by a strange coincidence of circumstances, 
the last morning of his life witnessed the publication of the 
result deduced, according to the original plan, by the joint 
activity of the two observatories founded through his own 
exertions five thousand miles apart. The results deduced 
by Messrs. Ferguson and Hall from meridian and from mi- 
crometrie observations closely accord with each other, and 
with those deduced within the last few years by other meth- 
ods, —and a further discussion of materials from two other 
observatories shows a close corroboration of these values 
by one of them. 
While the first public announcement of these interesting 
deductions was issuing from the press, Gilliss breathed his 
last. The message for his departure could not have come 
more suddenly, yet it found him prepared, and with his lamp 
trimmed and burning. A month before, we had parted from 
him here in the full culmination of his meridian poweT, and 
most of us had felt the cordial pressure of his friendly 
grasp. It was but a day before that he had welcomed home 
his eldest son, freed from the horrors of a rebel dungeov- 
are but a few minutes since he had welcomed the new 
