ASPECTS OF AMERICAN ASTRONOMY. 89 



to know. Some questions may require centuries, others thousands of 

 years for their answer. And yet never was jDrogress more rapi'd 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. IsTever before had the astron- 

 omer 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 predecessors left him. 



To us an interesting feature of this progress 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 appropriately 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 cisatlantic countries, our own included, were partes 

 iufidelium. 



Yet American astronomy is not entirely of oar generation. In the 

 middle of the last century Professor Winthrop, of Harvard, was an 

 industrious observer of eclipses and kindred phenomena, whose work 

 was recorded in the transactions of learned societies. But the greatest 

 astronomical activity during our colonial period was that called out 

 by the transit of Venus in 1769, which was visible in this country. A 

 committee of the American Philosophical Society, at Philadelphia, 

 organized an excellent systems of observations, which we now know 

 to have been fully as successful, perhaps more so, than the majority of 

 those made on other continents, owing mainly to the advantages of air 

 and climate. Among the observers was the celebrated Eittenhouse, 

 to whom is due the distinction of having been the first American 

 astronomer whose work has an important place in the history of the 

 science. In addition to the observations which he has left us, he was 

 the first inventor or proposer of the coUimating telescope, an instru- 

 ment which has become almost a necessity wherever accurate observa- 

 tions are made. The fact that the subsequent invention by Bessel was 

 quite independent does not detract from the merits of either. 



Shortly after the transit of Venus, which I have mentioned, the war 

 of the Revolution commenced. The generation which carried on that 

 war and the following one, which framed our Constitution and laid the 

 bases of our political institutions, were naturally too much occupied 

 with these great problems to pay much attention to pure science. 

 While the great mathematical astronomers of Europe were laying the 

 foundation of celestial mechanics their writings were a sealed book 

 to everyone on this side of the Atlantic, and so remained until Bow- 

 ditch appeared, early in the present century. His translation of the 

 Mecanique Celeste made an epoch in American science by bringing 

 the great work of Laplace down to the reach of the best American 

 students of his time. ■ . 



