10 
with those made at Greenwich. But 
“owing to the lack of printed material the 
board found it impossible to form a satis- 
factory opinion upon that work, without 
devoting to the task an inadmissible amount 
of time and labor.” The facts were laid 
before the board and ignored by it. They 
would have shown to the credit of the 
Observatory. 
It is needless to say that the figures in 
the above table are not given by the board 
in its comparison of the three observatories 
named as they are given here. The board 
had to make a case against the Observatory, 
and the charge of extravagance of outlay in 
proportion to the output of results had to 
be substantiated. Accordingly, the whole 
staff of the Observatory, scientific and lay, 
is contrasted with that at Harvard, and 
the numbers are brought to an equality by 
adding in the artisans and laborers em- 
ployed about the buildings and grounds, 
Harvard having practically none. By this 
process the astronomical personnel of the 
Observatory is shown to be one in excess 
of that at Harvard, and the salaries are 
compared on this basis, greatly to the dis- 
advantage of the Observatory. This enu- 
meration also charges the Observatory with 
two ‘directors’ for the same obvious reason. 
Although the board had no time to form an 
opinion, it should have learned, if it could 
have assimilated the information which it 
received, that the Observatory, like other 
naval establishments, has but one ‘head,’ 
and that the astronomical director of the 
Observatory is the head of the astronomical 
department, just as a naval officer is the 
head of the department of nautical instru- 
ments. To charge two ‘heads’ to the Ob- 
servatory in order to increase the apparent 
extravagance of maintenance is clearly a 
perversion of fact. If the Observatory has 
two heads, then it has eight heads, one for 
each department, and including the super- 
intendent. 
SCIENCE. 
[N. S. Von. XIII. No. 314. 
The attention of the Bureau is asked to 
a comparison of salaries, shown in the 
above table, which forms the basis of the 
board’s charge of extravagance. At both 
Greenwich and Harvard the salary of the 
director is $5,000. At the Observatory, 
using the board’s own method of comparison, 
the corresponding salary is $3,500. But, 
by the ingenious device of a ‘dual head,’ 
the board increases it to $4,000 and then 
doublesit. Naval officers receive their pay, 
whether they happen to be on duty at the 
Observatory or elsewhere; but the board 
chooses to assume that the salary of every 
professor of mathematics in the navy, active 
or retired, except two at the Naval Acad- 
emy, is chargeable to the expenses of the 
Observatory. It therefore charges in its 
exhibit the salaries of officers on the retired 
list, and the salary of one officer, still on 
the active list, whose connection with the 
Observatory has long since definitely ceased 
for cause. By such flimsy expedients as 
these the expense column is easily swelled. 
It might be swelled to any amount desired 
by simply charging against it the salary of 
any or every living officer of the navy, 
active or retired, who had ever been on 
duty at the Observatory. It is in the 
lower grades particularly, however, that I 
ask a fair comparison of salaries at the 
three institutions selected by the board. 
At Greenwich, for example, computers re- 
ceive an average of $325 per year, less than 
one-half the pay of our laborers, and less 
than the remuneration of any human being 
doing skilled work in the United States. 
At Harvard computers receive an average 
of $600, less than the pay of any person in 
the United States service. These computers 
are largely women, who can be got to work 
for next to nothing. Now the Observatory 
pays its employees at exactly the same (or 
in some cases less) rate as in other branches 
of the government service in corresponding 
grades. To charge extravagance against 
