Part 19

The director of this new observatory has already distinguished himself in the delicate and difficult work of investigating this motion, and I am glad to know that he is continuing the work here with one of the finest instruments ever used for the purpose, a splendid product of American mechanical genius. I can assure you that astronomers the world over will look with the greatest interest for Professor Doolittle's success in the arduous task he has undertaken.

There is one question connected with these studies of the universe on which I have not touched, and which is, nevertheless, of transcendent interest. What sort of life, spiritual and intellectual, exists in distant worlds? We cannot for a moment suppose that our little planet is the only one throughout the whole universe on which may be found the fruits of civilization, family affection, friendship, the desire to penetrate the mysteries of creation. And yet this question is not to-day a problem of astronomy, nor can we see any prospect that it ever will be, for the simple reason that science affords us no hope of an answer to any question that we may send through the fathomless abyss. When the spectroscope was in its infancy it was suggested that possibly some difference might be found in the rays reflected from living matter, especially from vegetation, that might enable us to distinguish them from rays reflected by matter not endowed with life. But this hope has not been realized, nor does it seem possible to realize it. The astronomer cannot afford to waste his energies on hopeless speculation about matters of which he cannot learn anything, and he therefore leaves this question of the plurality of worlds to others who are as competent to discuss it as he is. All he can tell the world is:

He who through vast immensity can pierce, See worlds on worlds compose one universe; Observe how system into system runs, What other planets circle other suns, What varied being peoples every star, May tell why Heaven has made us as we are.

XVIII

ASPECTS OF AMERICAN ASTRONOMY

The University of Chicago yesterday accepted one of the most munificent gifts ever made for the promotion of any single science, and with appropriate ceremonies dedicated it to the increase of our knowledge of the heavenly bodies.

The president of your university has done me the honor of inviting me to supplement what was said on that occasion by some remarks of a more general nature suggested by the celebration. One is naturally disposed to say first what is uppermost in his mind. At the present moment this will naturally be the general impression made by what has been seen and heard. The ceremonies were attended, not only by a remarkable delegation of citizens, but by a number of visiting astronomers which seems large when we consider that the profession itself is not at all numerous in any country. As one of these, your guests, I am sure that I give expression only to their unanimous sentiment in saying that we have been extremely gratified in many ways by all that we have seen and heard. The mere fact of so munificent a gift to science cannot but excite universal admiration. We knew well enough that it was nothing more than might have been expected from the public spirit of this great West; but the first view of a towering snowpeak is none the less impressive because you have learned in your geography how many feet high it is, and great acts are none the less admirable because they correspond to what you have heard and read, and might therefore be led to expect.

The next gratifying feature is the great public interest excited by the occasion. That the opening of a purely scientific institution should have led so large an assemblage of citizens to devote an entire day, including a long journey by rail, to the celebration of yesterday is something most suggestive from its unfamiliarity. A great many scientific establishments have been inaugurated during the last half-century, but if on any such occasion so large a body of citizens has gone so great a distance to take part in the inauguration, the fact has at the moment escaped my mind.

That the interest thus shown is not confined to the hundreds of attendants, but must be shared by your great public, is shown by the unfailing barometer of journalism. Here we have a field in which the non-survival of the unfit is the rule in its most ruthless form. The journals that we see and read are merely the fortunate few of a countless number, dead and forgotten, that did not know what the public wanted to read about. The eagerness shown by the representatives of your press in recording everything your guests would say was accomplished by an enterprise in making known everything that occurred, and, in case of an emergency requiring a heroic measure, what did NOT occur, showing that smart journalists of the East must have learned their trade, or at least breathed their inspiration, in these regions. I think it was some twenty years since I told a European friend that the eighth wonder of the world was a Chicago daily newspaper. Since that time the course of journalistic enterprise has been in the reverse direction to that of the course of empire, eastward instead of westward.

It has been sometimes said--wrongfully, I think--that scientific men form a mutual admiration society. One feature of the occasion made me feel that we, your guests, ought then and there to have organized such a society and forthwith proceeded to business. This feature consisted in the conferences on almost every branch of astronomy by which the celebration of yesterday was preceded. The fact that beyond the acceptance of a graceful compliment I contributed nothing to these conferences relieves me from the charge of bias or self-assertion in saying that they gave me a new and most inspiring view of the energy now being expended in research by the younger generation of astronomers. All the experience of the past leads us to believe that this energy will reap the reward which nature always bestows upon those who seek her acquaintance from unselfish motives. In one way it might appear that little was to be learned from a meeting like that of the present week. Each astronomer may know by publications pertaining to the science what all the others are doing. But knowledge obtained in this way has a sort of abstractness about it a little like our knowledge of the progress of civilization in Japan, or of the great extent of the Australian continent. It was, therefore, a most happy thought on the part of your authorities to bring together the largest possible number of visiting astronomers from Europe, as well as America, in order that each might see, through the attrition of personal contact, what progress the others were making in their researches. To the visitors at least I am sure that the result of this meeting has been extremely gratifying. They earnestly hope, one and all, that the callers of the conference will not themselves be more disappointed in its results; that, however little they may have actually to learn of methods and results, they will feel stimulated to well-directed efforts and find themselves inspired by thoughts which, however familiar, will now be more easily worked out.

We may pass from the aspects of the case as seen by the strictly professional class to those general aspects fitted to excite the attention of the great public. From the point of view of the latter it may well appear that the most striking feature of the celebration is the great amount of effort which is shown to be devoted to the cultivation of a field quite outside the ordinary range of human interests. The workers whom we see around us are only a detachment from an army of investigators who, in many parts of the world, are seeking to explore the mysteries of creation. Why so great an expenditure of energy? Certainly not to gain wealth, for astronomy is perhaps the one field of scientific work which, in our expressive modern phrase, "has no money in it." It is true that the great practical use of astronomical science to the country and the world in affording us the means of determining positions on land and at sea is frequently pointed out. It is said that an Astronomer Royal of England once calculated that every meridian observation of the moon made at Greenwich was worth a pound sterling, on account of the help it would afford to the navigation of the ocean. An accurate map of the United States cannot be constructed without astronomical observations at numerous points scattered over the whole country, aided by data which great observatories have been accumulating for more than a century, and must continue to accumulate in the future.

But neither the measurement of the earth, the making of maps, nor the aid of the navigator is the main object which the astronomers of to-day have in view. If they do not quite share the sentiment of that eminent mathematician, who is said to have thanked God that his science was one which could not be prostituted to any useful purpose, they still know well that to keep utilitarian objects in view would only prove & handicap on their efforts. Consequently they never ask in what way their science is going to benefit mankind. As the great captain of industry is moved by the love of wealth, and the political leader by the love of power over men, so the astronomer is moved by the love of knowledge for its own sake, and not for the sake of its useful applications. Yet he is proud to know that his science has been worth more to mankind than it has cost. He does not value its results merely as a means of crossing the ocean or mapping the country, for he feels that man does not live by bread alone. If it is not more than bread to know the place we occupy in the universe, it is certainly something which we should place not far behind the means of subsistence. That we now look upon a comet as something very interesting, of which the sight affords us a pleasure unmixed with fear of war, pestilence, or other calamity, and of which we therefore wish the return, is a gain we cannot measure by money. In all ages astronomy has been an index to the civilization of the people who cultivated it. It has been crude or exact, enlightened or mingled with superstition, according to the current mode of thought. When once men understand the relation of the planet on which they dwell to the universe at large, superstition is doomed to speedy extinction. This alone is an object worth more than money.

Astronomy may fairly claim to be that science which transcends all others in its demands upon the practical application of our reasoning powers. Look at the stars that stud the heavens on a clear evening. What more hopeless problem to one confined to earth than that of determining their varying distances, their motions, and their physical constitution? Everything on earth we can handle and investigate. But how investigate that which is ever beyond our reach, on which we can never make an experiment? On certain occasions we see the moon pass in front of the sun and hide it from our eyes. To an observer a few miles away the sun was not entirely hidden, for the shadow of the moon in a total eclipse is rarely one hundred miles wide. On another continent no eclipse at all may have been visible. Who shall take a map of the world and mark upon it the line on which the moon's shadow will travel during some eclipse a hundred years hence? Who shall map out the orbits of the heavenly bodies as they are going to appear in a hundred thousand years? How shall we ever know of what chemical elements the sun and the stars are made? All this has been done, but not by the intellect of any one man. The road to the stars has been opened only by the efforts of many generations of mathematicians and observers, each of whom began where his predecessor had left off.

We have reached a stage where we know much of the heavenly bodies. We have mapped out our solar system with great precision. But how with that great universe of millions of stars in which our solar system is only a speck of star-dust, a speck which a traveller through the wilds of space might pass a hundred times without notice? We have learned much about this universe, though our knowledge of it is still dim. We see it as a traveller on a mountain-top sees a distant city in a cloud of mist, by a few specks of glimmering light from steeples or roofs. We want to know more about it, its origin and its destiny; its limits in time and space, if it has any; what function it serves in the universal economy. The journey is long, yet we want, in knowledge at least, to make it. Hence we build observatories and train observers and investigators. Slow, indeed, is progress in the solution of the greatest of problems, when measured by what we want to know. Some questions may require centuries, others thousands of years for their answer. And yet never was progress more rapid than during our time. In some directions our astronomers of to-day are out of sight of those of fifty years ago; we are even gaining heights which twenty years ago looked hopeless. Never before had the astronomer so much work--good, hard, yet hopeful work--before him as to-day. He who is leaving the stage feels that he has only begun and must leave his successors with more to do than his predecessors left him.

To us an interesting feature of this progress is the part taken in it by our own country. The science of our day, it is true, is of no country. Yet we very appropriately speak of American science from the fact that our traditional reputation has not been that of a people deeply interested in the higher branches of intellectual work. Men yet living can remember when in the eyes of the universal church of learning, all cisatlantic countries, our own included, were partes infidelium.

Yet American astronomy is not entirely of our generation. In the middle of the last century Professor Winthrop, of Harvard, was an industrious observer of eclipses and kindred phenomena, whose work was recorded in the transactions of learned societies. But the greatest astronomical activity during our colonial period was that called out by the transit of Venus in 1769, which was visible in this country. A committee of the American Philosophical Society, at Philadelphia, organized an excellent system of observations, which we now know to have been fully as successful, perhaps more so, than the majority of those made on other continents, owing mainly to the advantages of air and climate. Among the observers was the celebrated Rittenhouse, to whom is due the distinction of having been the first American astronomer whose work has an important place in the history of the science. In addition to the observations which he has left us, he was the first inventor or proposer of the collimating telescope, an instrument which has become almost a necessity wherever accurate observations are made. The fact that the subsequent invention by Bessel may have been independent does not detract from the merits of either.

Shortly after the transit of Venus, which I have mentioned, the war of the Revolution commenced. The generation which carried on that war and the following one, which framed our Constitution and laid the bases of our political institutions, were naturally too much occupied with these great problems to pay much attention to pure science. While the great mathematical astronomers of Europe were laying the foundation of celestial mechanics their writings were a sealed book to every one on this side of the Atlantic, and so remained until Bowditch appeared, early in the present century. His translation of the Mecanique Celeste made an epoch in American science by bringing the great work of Laplace down to the reach of the best American students of his time.

American astronomers must always honor the names of Rittenhouse and Bowditch. And yet in one respect their work was disappointing of results. Neither of them was the founder of a school. Rittenhouse left no successor to carry on his work. The help which Bowditch afforded his generation was invaluable to isolated students who, here and there, dived alone and unaided into the mysteries of the celestial motions. His work was not mainly in the field of observational astronomy, and therefore did not materially influence that branch of science. In 1832 Professor Airy, afterwards Astronomer Royal of England, made a report to the British Association on the condition of practical astronomy in various countries. In this report he remarked that he was unable to say anything about American astronomy because, so far as he knew, no public observatory existed in the United States.

William C. Bond, afterwards famous as the first director of the Harvard Observatory, was at that time making observations with a small telescope, first near Boston and afterwards at Cambridge. But with so meagre an outfit his establishment could scarcely lay claim to being an astronomical observatory, and it was not surprising if Airy did not know anything of his modest efforts.

If at this time Professor Airy had extended his investigations into yet another field, with a view of determining the prospects for a great city at the site of Fort Dearborn, on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, he would have seen as little prospect of civic growth in that region as of a great development of astronomy in the United States at large. A plat of the proposed town of Chicago had been prepared two years before, when the place contained perhaps half a dozen families. In the same month in which Professor Airy made his report, August, 1832, the people of the place, then numbering twenty-eight voters, decided to become incorporated, and selected five trustees to carry on their government.

In 1837 a city charter was obtained from the legislature of Illinois. The growth of this infant city, then small even for an infant, into the great commercial metropolis of the West has been the just pride of its people and the wonder of the world. I mention it now because of a remarkable coincidence. With this civic growth has quietly gone on another, little noted by the great world, and yet in its way equally wonderful and equally gratifying to the pride of those who measure greatness by intellectual progress. Taking knowledge of the universe as a measure of progress, I wish to invite attention to the fact that American astronomy began with your city, and has slowly but surely kept pace with it, until to-day our country stands second only to Germany in the number of researches being prosecuted, and second to none in the number of men who have gained the highest recognition by their labors.

In 1836 Professor Albert Hopkins, of Williams College, and Professor Elias Loomis, of Western Reserve College, Ohio, both commenced little observatories. Professor Loomis went to Europe for all his instruments, but Hopkins was able even then to get some of his in this country. Shortly afterwards a little wooden structure was erected by Captain Gilliss on Capitol Hill, at Washington, and supplied with a transit instrument for observing moon culminations, in conjunction with Captain Wilkes, who was then setting out on his exploring expedition to the southern hemisphere. The date of these observatories was practically the same as that on which a charter for the city of Chicago was obtained from the legislature. With their establishment the population of your city had increased to 703.

The next decade, 1840 to 1850, was that in which our practical astronomy seriously commenced. The little observatory of Captain Gilliss was replaced by the Naval, then called the National Observatory, erected at Washington during the years 1843-44, and fitted out with what were then the most approved instruments. About the same time the appearance of the great comet of 1843 led the citizens of Boston to erect the observatory of Harvard College. Thus it is little more than a half-century since the two principal observatories in the United States were established. But we must not for a moment suppose that the mere erection of an observatory can mark an epoch in scientific history. What must make the decade of which I speak ever memorable in American astronomy was not merely the erection of buildings, but the character of the work done by astronomers away from them as well as in them.

The National Observatory soon became famous by two remarkable steps which raised our country to an important position among those applying modern science to practical uses. One of these consisted of the researches of Sears Cook Walker on the motion of the newly discovered planet Neptune. He was the first astronomer to determine fairly good elements of the orbit of that planet, and, what is yet more remarkable, he was able to trace back the movement of the planet in the heavens for half a century and to show that it had been observed as a fixed star by Lalande in 1795, without the observer having any suspicion of the true character of the object.

The other work to which I refer was the application to astronomy and to the determination of longitudes of the chronographic method of registering transits of stars or other phenomena requiring an exact record of the instant of their occurrence. It is to be regretted that the history of this application has not been fully written. In some points there seems to be as much obscurity as with the discovery of ether as an anaesthetic, which took place about the same time. Happily, no such contest has been fought over the astronomical as over the surgical discovery, the fact being that all who were engaged in the application of the new method were more anxious to perfect it than they were to get credit for themselves. We know that Saxton, of the Coast Survey; Mitchell and Locke, of Cincinnati; Bond, at Cambridge, as well as Walker, and other astronomers at the Naval Observatory, all worked at the apparatus; that Maury seconded their efforts with untiring zeal; that it was used to determine the longitude of Baltimore as early as 1844 by Captain Wilkes, and that it was put into practical use in recording observations at the Naval Observatory as early as 1846.

At the Cambridge Observatory the two Bonds, father and son, speedily began to show the stuff of which the astronomer is made. A well-devised system of observations was put in operation. The discovery of the dark ring of Saturn and of a new satellite to that planet gave additional fame to the establishment.

Nor was activity confined to the observational side of the science. The same decade of which I speak was marked by the beginning of Professor Pierce's mathematical work, especially his determination of the perturbations of Uranus and Neptune. At this time commenced the work of Dr. B. A. Gould, who soon became the leading figure in American astronomy. Immediately on graduating at Harvard in 1845, he determined to devote all the energies of his life to the prosecution of his favorite science. He studied in Europe for three years, took the doctor's degree at Gottingen, came home, founded the Astronomical Journal, and took an active part in that branch of the work of the Coast Survey which included the determination of longitudes by astronomical methods.

An episode which may not belong to the history of astronomy must be acknowledged to have had a powerful influence in exciting public interest in that science. Professor O. M. Mitchell, the founder and first director of the Cincinnati Observatory, made the masses of our intelligent people acquainted with the leading facts of astronomy by courses of lectures which, in lucidity and eloquence, have never been excelled. The immediate object of the lectures was to raise funds for establishing his observatory and fitting it out with a fine telescope. The popular interest thus excited in the science had an important effect in leading the public to support astronomical research. If public support, based on public interest, is what has made the present fabric of American astronomy possible, then should we honor the name of a man whose enthusiasm leavened the masses of his countrymen with interest in our science.