December 10, 1920] 



SCIENCE 



545 



to modern science, think you that stupid- 

 ity and superstition could have secured a 

 stranglehold upon Greek civilization and have 

 maintained a thousand years of ignorance 

 and mental degradation? Intellectual life 

 could not prosper in Europe so long as dogma 

 in Italy, only three hundred years ago, in the 

 days of Bruno and Galileo, was able to say, 

 " Animals which move have limbs and mus- 

 cles ; the earth has no limbs or muscles, there- 

 fore it does not move;" or as long as dogma 

 in Massachusetts, only 250 years ago, was , 

 able to hang by the neck until dead the 

 woman whom it charged with "giving a look 

 toward the great meeting house of Salem, and 

 inmaediately a demon entered the house and 

 tore down a part of the wainscoting." The 

 morals and the intellect of the world had 

 reached a deplorable state at the epoch of the 

 Borgias. It was the re-birth of science, 

 chiefly of astronomy, as exemplified by the 

 work of Columbus and Copernicus, and sec- 

 ondly the growth of medical science, which 

 gave to the people of Europe the power to 

 dispel gradually the unthinkable conditions 

 of the Middle Ages. 



It has been said that we may judge of the 

 degree of civilization of a nation by the pro- 

 vision which the people of the nation have 

 made for the study of astronomy. A review 

 of present-day nations is convincing that the 

 statement represents the approximate truth. 

 It is essentially true even of sections of our 

 own country. In ovoc first years as a nation 

 a few small telescopes were in private hands, 

 here and there; they were used merely for 

 occasional looking at the stars; there were no 

 observatories in the United States — no tele- 

 scopes suitably mounted and housed for the 

 serious study of the stars. The founding of 

 the third American observatory, at Hudson, 

 Ohio, about 1839, only a year or two after 

 the completion of the second observatory, at 

 Williams College, Massachusetts, was an ad- 

 mirable index to the intellectual outlook of 

 the Western Reserve.' The laying of the 

 comer stone of the Cincinnati Observatory in 



3 The northeastern part of Ohio constitutes the 

 "Western Reserve." 



1843, a wonderfully ambitious institution for 

 its day, was an event considered by Ex-Presi- 

 dent John Quincy Adams to be worthy of a 

 hard trip, in the seventy-seventh year of his 

 life, by rail from Massachusetts to Buffalo, 

 by lake steamer to Cleveland, by four days of 

 miserable canal boat to Columbus and thence 

 on to Cincinnati, to deliver the formal address 

 — then called an oration. Adams's task was, 

 to quote his words, " To turn this enthusiasm 

 for astronomy at Cincinnati into a perman- 

 ent and persevering national pursuit, which 

 may extend the bounds of himian knowledge, 

 and make the country instrumental in ele- 

 vating the character and improving the con- 

 dition of man upon earth." 



Our former slave states have to-day only 

 one active observatory, at the University of 

 Virginia, presented by McCormick of Chi- 

 cago. Barnard and other astronomical en- 

 thusiasts, bom and grown to manhood in the 

 south, have found their opjwrtunities in the 

 great northern observatories. What is true 

 of astronomy in the south is true, in general, 

 of the other sciences. This unfortunate re- 

 sult is the natural product of the false, im- 

 seientific system of labor which, prevailing 

 through many generations, taught that it is 

 undignified for the white man to eat bread 

 by the sweat of his own brow. Financial re- 

 covery, following 1865, has accordingly been 

 slow. The future vrill correct this, for the 

 men of the south are our blood brothers. 

 We should be, and are, sympathetic. 



Shall we try to estimate what astronomy, 

 the oldMt of the sciences, sometimes caUed an 

 ideal and unpractical science, has done for 

 mankind ? 



Here are some of the applications of astron- 

 omy to daily life. 



1. Observations of the stars with the transit 

 instrument, such as exists in this observatory, 

 are supplying the nations with accurate time. 

 Two astronomers, with modem instrumental 

 equipment, situated on the same north and 

 south line, may observe the stars so ac- 

 curately, in comparison with the beats of 

 their common clock, that they will agree 



