The Reminiscences of an Astronomer

by Simon Newcomb

I nodded assent.

Then he drew his overcoat tightly around him with a gesture of shivering from the cold, beat his hands upon his breast as if to warm it, and again looked inquiringly at me.

I nodded again.

The bargain was complete. He was to have two rubles for the drive, and a little something to warm up his shivering breast. So he could not be Struve's man.

There is no welcome warmer than a Russian one, and none in any country warmer than that which the visiting astronomer receives at an observatory. Great is the contrast between the winter sky of a clear moonless night and the interior of a dining-room, forty feet square, with a big blazing fire at one end and a table loaded with eatables in the middle. The fact that the visitor had never before met one of his hosts detracted nothing from the warmth of his reception.

The organizer of the observatory, and its first director, was Wilhelm Struve, father of the one who received me, and equally great as man and astronomer. Like many other good Russians, he was the father of a large family. One of his sons was for ten years the Russian minister at Washington, and as popular a diplomatist as ever lived among us. The instruments which Struve designed sixty years ago still do as fine work as any in the world; but one may suspect this to be due more to the astronomers who handle them than to the instruments themselves.

The air is remarkably clear; the entrance to St. Petersburg, ten or twelve miles north, is distinctly visible, and Struve told me that during the Crimean war he could see, through the great telescope, the men on the decks of the British ships besieging Kronstadt, thirty miles away.

One drawback from which the astronomers suffer is the isolation of the place. The village at the foot of the little hill is inhabited only by peasants, and the astronomers and employees have nearly all to be housed in the observatory buildings. There is no society but their own nearer than the capital. At the time of my visit the scientific staff was almost entirely German or Swedish, by birth or language. In the state, two opposing parties are the Russian, which desires the ascendency of the native Muscovites, and the German, which appreciates the fact that the best and most valuable of the Tsar's subjects are of German or other foreign descent. During the past twenty years the Russian party has gradually got the upper hand; and the result of this ascendency at Pulkova will be looked for with much solicitude by astronomers everywhere.

Once a year the lonely life of the astronomers is enlivened by a grand feast—that of the Russian New Year. One object of the great dining-room which I have mentioned, the largest room, I believe, in the whole establishment, was to make this feast possible. My visit took place early in March, so that I did not see the celebration; but from what I have heard, the little colony does what it can to make up for a year of ennui. Every twenty-five years it celebrates a jubilee; the second came off in 1889.

There is much to interest the visitor in a Russian peasant village, and that of Pulkova has features some of which I have never seen described. Above the door of each log hut is the name of the occupant, and below the name is a rude picture of a bucket, hook, or some other piece of apparatus used in extinguishing fire. Inside, the furniture is certainly meagre enough, yet one could not see why the occupants should be otherwise than comfortable. I know of no good reason why ignorance should imply unhappiness; altogether, there is some good room for believing that the less civilized races can enjoy themselves, in their own way, about as well as we can. What impressed me as the one serious hardship of the peasantry was their hours of labor. Just how many hours of the twenty-four these beings find for sleep was not clear to the visitor; they seemed to be at work all day, and at midnight many of them had to start on their way to St. Petersburg with a cartload for the market. A church ornamented with tinsel is a feature of every Russian village; so also are the priests. The only two I saw were sitting on a fence, wearing garments that did not give evidence of having known water since they were made. One great drawback to the growth of manufactures in Russia is the number of feast days, on which the native operators must one and all abandon their work, regardless of consequences.