712 
the relation of the planet on which they 
dwell to the universe at large superstition 
is doomed to speedy extinction. This alone 
is an object worth more than money. 
Astronomy may fairly claim to be that 
science which transcends all others in its 
demands upon the practical application of 
our reasoning powers. Look at the stars 
that stud the heavens on a clear evening. 
What more hopeless problem to one con- 
fined to earth than that of determining 
their varying distances, their motions and 
their physical constitution ? Everything on 
earth we can handle and investigate. But 
how investigate that which is ever beyond 
our reach, on which we can never make an 
experiment? On certain occasions we see 
the moon pass in front of the sun and hide 
it from our eyes. To an observer a few 
miles away the sun was not entirely hid- 
den, for the shadow of the moon in a total 
eclipse is rarely 100 miles wide. On an- 
other continent no eclipse at all may have 
been visible. Who shall take a map of the 
world and mark upon if the line on which 
the moon’s shadow will travel during some 
eclipse a hundred years hence? Who shall 
map out the orbits of the heavenly bodies 
as they are going to appear in a hundred 
thousand years? How shall we ever know 
of what chemical elements the sun and the 
stars are made? All this has been done, 
but not by the intellect of any one man. 
The road to the stars has been opened only 
by the efforts of many generations of math- 
ematicians and observers, each of whom be- 
gan where his predecessor had left off. 
We have reached,a certain stage where 
we know much about the heavenly bodies. 
We have mapped out our solar system with 
great precision. But how with that great 
universe of millions of stars in which our 
solar system is only a speck of star dust, a 
speck which a traveler through the wilds 
of space might pass a hundred times with- 
out notice? We have learned much about 
SCIENCE. 
[N. S. Vou. VI. No. 150. 
this universe, though our knowledge of it is 
still dim. We see it as a traveler on a 
mountain top sees a distant city in a cloud 
of mist, by a few specks of glimmering light 
from steeples or roofs. We want to know 
more about it, its origin and its destiny; 
its limits in time and space, if it has any; 
what function it serves in the universal 
economy. The journey is long, yet we 
want, in knowledge at least, to reach the 
stars. Hence we build observatories and 
train observers and investigators. Slow, 
indeed, is progress in the solution of the 
greatest of problems when measured by 
what we want to know. Some questions 
may require centuries, others thousands of 
years for their answer. And yet never was 
progress more rapid than during our time. 
In some directions our astronomers of to- 
day are out of sight of those of fifty years 
ago; we are even gaining heights which 
twenty years ago looked hopeless. Never 
before had the astronomer so much work, 
good, hard, yet hopeful work, before him as 
to-day. He who is leaving the stage feels 
that he has only begun and must leave his 
successors with more to do than his prede- 
cessors left him. 
To us an interesting feature of this prog- 
ress is the part taken in it by our own 
country. The science of our day, it is true, 
is of no country. Yet, we very appropri- 
ately speak of American science from the 
fact that our traditional reputation has not 
been that of a people deeply interested in 
the higher branches of intellectual work. 
Men yet living can remember when in the 
eyes of the universal church of learning all 
cisatlantie countries, our own included, 
were partes infideliwm. 
Yet American astronomy is not entirely 
of our generation. In the middle of the 
last century Professor Winthrop of Harvard 
was an industrious observer of eclipses and 
kindred phenomena, whose work was re- 
corded in the transactions of learned socie- 
