SAMUEL PIERPONT LANGLEY. 
BY 
Cyrus Adler. 
[Read Before the Society, November 24, 190(3.] 
Samuel Pierpont Langley, the third Secretary of the 
Smithsonian Institution, astronomer and physicist, famed 
the world over for epoch-making contributions to our knowl- 
edge of the sun and the establishment of the principles of 
aerial flight, passed away in his seventy-second year, at 
Aiken, South Carolina, on the twenty-seventh of February, 
1906. 
Mr. Langley was descended of families which came to 
Massachusetts in the early part of the 17th century, and to 
a great extent remained in the colony and even in the State 
itself. In a biography prepared by the late George Brown 
Goode eleven years ago, it was pointed out that an unusual 
number of his ancestors were skilled mechanics and artisans, 
while, on the other hand, a group of them were of the most 
intellectual men of early New England— clergymen, school- 
masters, and indeed one of them, Increase Mather, a presi- 
dent of Harvard College and the author of the first American 
work upon astronomy. 
His immediate forebears were especially characterized by 
great physical and intellectual vigor, wide cultivation, and 
a staunch sense of duty ; and if to these distinguishing char- 
acteristics of a long line of ancestors, there be added me- 
chanical skill, high moral ideals, and a restless, all-consum- 
ing pursuit of new truth, in season and out of season, by 
skillful methods, upon original lines, we have a picture of 
1— Bull. Phil. Soc., Wash., Vol. 15. (1) 
