The Present Condition of the Latitude Problem. 
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THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE LATITUDE 
PROBLEM. 
By G. C. COMSTOCK. 
[ABSTRACT.] 
The title which has been announced for my paper, “ The Present Con¬ 
dition of the Latitude Problem,” imposes upon me the necessity of ex¬ 
plaining in what the latitude problem consists, since I can not assume 
that the term thus employed will be well understood even in scientific 
circles. 
There come down to ns from remote antiquity legends, curious enough 
in themselves, which seem to imply that at the time of their origin a 
very different condition of affairs obtained from that which now exists. 
Thus the early Egyptian temples appear to have been oriented with ref¬ 
erence to the points of the compass at times when those points were 
different from what they now are, and there are traditions of a time at 
which the sun rose in the west and set in the east. And coming down 
to much more recent dates, speculation has been rife as to whether the 
great pyramids in Egypt may not contain in themselves evidence of a 
changed position of the earth’s rotation axis. 
Until within the last half dozen years such matters were looked 
upon by astronomers with the utmost incredulity, and it was almost a 
matter of faith that the earth’s axis is the one thing terrestrial which is 
permanent in position. But about a half dozen years since Dr. Knestner, 
one of the astronomers connected with the observatory at Berlin, under¬ 
took a very extended and accurate series of latitude determinations at 
that place, having in view as the object to be attained the solution of a 
very different problem, the determination of the so-called “ constant of 
aberration.” But Kuestner’s results for the aberration came out wrong; 
they would not agree with the classical values of this quantity elsewhere 
determined, and he found himself face to face with the alternatives that 
either his observations were hopelessly bad, or that the latitude of his 
observatory had changed to the amount of nearly half a second during 
