Courtesy of “The Journal of American History,” Vol. IV, Number 3 (1910).
Set of Silver Medals Presented to Maury by Pope Pius IX
See [page 65]
Courtesy of “The Journal of American History,” Vol. IV, Number 3 (1910).
Medals Bestowed upon Maury
Gold medals bestowed upon Maury by the rulers of Sweden, Prussia, Holland, Austria, Sardinia, and France, the Republic of Bremen, and the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855. See [page 65].
CHAPTER VII
His Extra-Professional Interests
During the many years he spent at the Naval Observatory, Maury was by no means a narrow-minded specialist, as can be readily seen by a consideration of the wide range of his interests, which extended from the planting of sunflowers to keep malaria away from the Observatory to speculations as to the navigation of the air and a curious machine that was a kind of combination of phonograph and telephone. Before going forward with the story of his life, it would be well, therefore, to pause and consider some of these extra-professional activities that he was interested in.
Maury’s interest in land meteorology had some connection, indeed, with his particular field of research; and in the beginning this was a part of his plan for a universal system of meteorological observations. But the opposition of Great Britain led him to withdraw it from the program of matters to be considered at the Brussels Conference, under the impression that a half of a loaf was better than no loaf at all. Upon his return to America after the conference, he began almost immediately to advocate the calling of another conference to consider land meteorology. As to the connection between the meteorology of the land and the sea he wrote in his “Sailing Directions” of 1855, “The great atmospherical ocean, at the bottom of which we are creeping along, and the laws of which touch so nearly the well-being of the whole human family, embraces the land as well as the sea, and neither those laws nor the movement and phenomena of the atmosphere can be properly studied or thoroughly investigated until observations, both by land and sea, shall enable us to treat the atmosphere as a whole”.