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.