PROCEEDINGS OF THE OHIO ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 199 



small astronomical observatory which he soon foimd means for 

 building and which almost completely hidden by vines may still 

 be seen by the visitor to the deserted campus at Hudson. 



This was the first permanent observatory erected west of the 

 Allegheny mountains and one of the very earliest in America. 

 Loomis remained in Hudson for six or seven years, during which 

 he managed to do an almost incredible amount of work, observing 

 hundreds of moon culminations, and culminations of Polaris 

 for determining longitude and latitude, complete observations of 

 five comets whose orbits he computed, besides an extensive series 

 of magnetic observations at over seventy stations extending 

 from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi river. 



He left Hudson in 1844 to accept a professorship in an 

 Eastern College, but he returned to his Ohio observatory for 

 ^ short time in 1849 ^o take charge of the observations at the 

 Hudson end of a telegraphic connection with Philadelphia for 

 the purpose of determining its longitude by the then new and 

 novel method of using the telegraph in longitude work. Of 

 his laborious life and extensive contributions to science subse- 

 quent to his leaving Ohio, it is not my purpose tO' speak. 



Just twenty years after the coming of Loomis there came to 

 the same college, still much in the woods, another astronomer 

 destmed to achieve great fame. After graduating, at the age 

 of eighteen years, from Dartmouth College, the leader of a 

 class of fifty, Charles A. Young spent a few years at Andover, 

 teaching Latin and Greek in Phillips Academy, and at the same 

 time studying theology at the seminary for which that place is 

 noted. His father was a famous professor at Dartmouth, as 

 also was his grandfather in his day and when the call came 

 from Hudson inviting him to accept the chair of mathematics 

 and natural philosophy his inherited love for exact science made 

 it impossible for him to decline. "It saved me," he once said to 

 me with a twinkle in his sparkling black eyes, "from being food 

 for cannibals," as he had intended becoming a missionary. He 

 was but twenty-two years of age when he came to Hudson, but 

 it is not too much to say that at that time no other college in 

 Ohio or in the west could boast of so brilliant an exponent of 



