96 ASPECTS OF AMERICAN ASTRONOMY. 



institution to be a great success, to do work which sliall show that 

 the intellectual productiveness of your community will not be allowed 

 to lag behind its material growth. The public is very apt to feel that 

 when some munificent patron of science has mounted a great telescope 

 under a suitable dome, and supplied all the apparatus which the 

 astronomer wants to use, success is assured. But such is not the case. 

 The most important requisite, one more difficult to command than tele- 

 scopes or observatories, may still be wanting. A great telescope is of 

 no use without a man at the end of it, and what the telescope may do 

 depends more upon this appendage than upon the instrument itself. 

 The place which telescopes and observatories have taken in astronom- 

 ical history are by no means proportional to their dimensions. Many a 

 great instrument has been a mere toy in the hands of its owner. Many 

 a small one has become famous. 



Twenty years ago there was here in your own city a modest little 

 instrument which, judged by its size, could not hold up its head with 

 the great ones even of that day. It was the private property of a 

 young man holding no scientific position and scarcely known to the 

 public. And yet that little telescope is to-day among the famous ones 

 of the world, having made memorable advances in the astronomy of 

 double stars, and shown its owner to be a worthy successor of the 

 Herschels and Struves in that line of work, 



A hundred observers might have used the appliances of the Lick 

 Observatory for a whole generation without finding tlie fifth satellite of 

 Jupiter; without successfully photographing the cloud forms of the 

 Milky Way; without discovering the extraordinary patches of nebu- 

 lous light, nearly or quite invisible to the human eye, which fill some 

 regions of the heavens. 



When I was in Zurich last year I paid a visit to the little but not 

 unknown observatory of its famous polytechnic school. The professor 

 of astronomy was especially interested in the observations of the sun 

 with the aid of the spectroscope, and among the ingenious devices 

 which he described, not the least interesting was the method of photo- 

 grajDhing the sun by special rays of tlie spectrum, which had been 

 worked out at the Kenwood Observatory in Chicago. The Kenwood 

 Observatory is not, I believe, in the eye of the j)ublic one of the note- 

 worthy institutions of your city which every visitor is taken to see, and 

 yet this invention has given it an important place in the science of our 

 day. 



Should you ask me what are the most hopeful features in the great 

 establishment which you are now dedicating, I would say that they are 

 not alone to be found in the size of your unequaled telescope, nor in 

 the cost of the outfit, but in the fact that your authorities have shown 

 their appreciation of the requirements of success by adding to the 

 material outfit of the establishment the three men whose works I have 

 described. 



Gentlemen of the Trustees, allow me to commend to your fostering 



