2 
ADLER. 
the intellectual and moral make-up of the man whose life 
I am now attempting, inadequately, to portray. 
He beguiled the tedium of his last illness by beginning 
the preparation of his memoirs, which I have been per- 
mitted to see. They are so fragmentary that they can never 
be published ; but from them I have been able to learn a few 
incidents of his early life which it is not improper to recite. 
He was born on the twenty -second of August, 1834, in 
Vernon street, Roxbury, to Samuel Langley and Mary Wil- 
liams; attended various private schools, and later entered 
the Boston High School. His education was of the type 
then prevalent, and much of his time was devoted to Latin 
grammar. On the moral side, the two strongest impressions 
which he recollected of this period were being taught a hor- 
ror of debt and, through it, a sense of duty; and these two 
traits were firmly present to the last. 
Yet another fact taken from these very interestingly writ- 
ten pages shows that his father, himself a wholesale mer- 
chant in Boston, possessed a telescope with which the small 
boy watched the building of Bunker Hill monument. 
As a child, he was an omnivorous reader, had a reflective 
mind, an interest in art and in foreign lands, and a very 
strong bent toward mathematics, all of which grew to im- 
portance in later life. Not being sent to college, his choice 
of a profession fell upon civil engineering and architecture, 
which were primarily chosen because they would afford a 
livelihood and at the same time keep him near to several 
of the studies that interested him most. 
In 1857 he went to the West, and spent the next seven 
years mainly in Chicago arid St, Louis, engaged in the prac- 
tice of his profession and in business, acquiring a mercantile 
training and skill as a draftsman which were of high im- 
portance in his later scientific and administrative career. 
In 1864 he definitely abandoned his profession and re- 
turned to New England, spending some time with his 
brother, John Williams Langley, in building a telescope; 
and the brothers afterward had a year or more of European 
travel, visiting art galleries and observatories, and indeed 
