FIFTY-FIRST CONGRESS, 1889-1891. 1545 
Private citizens have subscribed $10,000 for an astrophysical observatory under the 
charge of the Regents, in the hope that Congress would maintain it, and the Smith- 
sonian Institution proposes, in this case, to contribute the most recent apparatus, to 
the value of $5,000 more. 
The sum now asked is to be applied to the completion of the plant and to pay the 
current expenses, including the salaries of three assistants, to be engaged in researches 
of great scientifi an’ economic value, wholly distinct in apparatus, methods, and 
objects fron the quite otherwise important ones of those of the United States Naval 
Observatory. 
It seems proper to state that the present appropriation is not asked for as an intro- 
duction to a larger one later, but that owing to the scale on which it is proposed to 
found and maintain this small establishment no larger app ppneon is contem- 
plated as necessary for many years at least. 
Explanation by Mr. S. P. Langley, Secretary Smithsonian Institution, in a letter dated 
October 20, 1890. 
In submitting an estimate of $10,000 for the maintenance of a small astrophysical 
observatory and laboratory, to be situated in the National Zoological Park and under 
the immediate care of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Congress is asked 
for the first time to give aid in a comparatively recent field of research that has been 
considered of sufficient importance by the legislators of leading foreign nations to 
justify the establishment of costly special observatories and their maintenance with 
a staff of astronomers and physicists of wide reputation. 
The class of work does not ordinarily involve the use of the telescope, and is distinct 
from that carried on at any other observatory in this country. It would conflict in 
no way with the work of the present United States Naval Observatory. 
Briefly stated, the work for which the older government observatories at Green- 
wich, Paris, Berlin, and Washington were founded, and in which they are actually 
chiefly engaged, is the determination of relative positions of heavenly bodies and our 
own place with reference to them. Within the past twenty years all these govern- 
ments but our own have created an addition to these, a distinct and additional class— 
astrophysical observatories, as they are called—that are engaged in the’study of the 
constitution of the heavenly bodies ag distinguished from their positions; in deter- 
mining, for example, not so much the position of the sun in the sky as the relation 
that it bears to the earth and to our own daily wants. 
Briefly, and to use the same instance, the old observatories, as regards their work 
on the sun, are chiefly occupied in determining where it is in the heavens daily, for 
the purpose of the navigator; the new astrophysical observatories, in determining 
what it is, how it affects terrestrial climate, and how it may best be studied for the 
purposes of the meteorologist and for other purposes of an immediately practical 
nature. 
A partial instrumental outfit for a small astrophysical observatory has been pro- 
cured by the Smithsonian Institution and placed in a temporary structure in the 
Smithsonian grounds, and, by private subscription, $10,000 is now at the disposi- 
tion of the Institution to aid in this research. The sum now asked for is to be 
applied to the completion of the plant and to the payment of current expenses, 
including the salaries of three assistants, and it seems proper to state that no larger 
appropriation is contemplated as necessary for at least many years. 
ASTROPHYSICAL OBSERVATORY—APPROPRIATIONS. 
February 3, 1891—House. 
Mr. J. G. Cannon reported from Committee on Appropriations in 
sundry civil bill for 1892, $10,000. 
