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ASTRONOMY IN AMERICA. 
Br RICHARD A. PROCTOR. 
D URING- my visits to America in 1873-74 and 1875-76, I 
was led from time to time to notice with interest the pro- 
gress and promise of astronomical science in America. My own 
special purpose in visiting America on these occasions partly 
brought these matters to’ my attention. The circumstance that 
in a country so much more thinly peopled than Great Britain, 
it should be possible not only to obtain audiences for lectures on 
such a subject as astronomy, but to obtain more and better and 
larger audiences by far than could be obtained during a lecture 
season in England, for any single scientific subject whatever, 
appeared to me in itself sufficiently remarkable. At a first view 
this might have been referred simply to the fact that the Ameri- 
cans are a lecture-loving people, preferring the quick and ready 
method of learning the more striking facts of a subject from 
a verbal exposition, to close study and application. But I soon 
perceived that something more than the mere desire for super- 
ficial knowledge was in question. The number of persons 
making close inquiry into the subject was nearly always 
greater (even in proportion to the much greater audiences), 
than in England. That still more select section of every audi- 
ence, the actual workers and observers, I also found to be corre- 
spondingly large ; while again and again I met with what in 
England is certainly very unfrequent — cases, namely, in which 
persons not engaged professionally in the study or teaching of 
astronomy had privately worked so zealously and so ingeniously 
in astronomical research as to have effected original discoveries 
of considerable interest. 
I do not propose, however, to enter here into an account 
of these experiences of my own. To do so would indeed be a 
welcome task to me, as enabling me in some degree to express 
not only my sense of the interest taken by Americans in science, 
but also my recognition of the unvarying kindness with which I 
was personally received. At Boston, New York, Philadelphia, 
I 
