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Arthur carefully noted the direction, and came down from his observatory on the run. He was confident there must be a trapper's fire, or a camp, or some other traces of humanity where that thin haze hung. He could not be baulked this time. Hope, which is verily a beauteous hydra in the young breast, revived again in strength.
It was understood that I was to perform the easier part of furnishing the money for an observatory and instruments of our own, and I was determined to keep pace with Margaret in her studies as well as I could in an amateurish way, so that she might be able to retain me as an assistant.
The official Board of Visitors established by Congress and appointed in 1901 expressed its conclusion that the official head of the observatory should be an eminent astronomer appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, holding his place by a tenure at least as permanent as that of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey or the head of the Geological Survey, and not merely by a detail of two or three years' duration.
On getting to the observatory, we consulted the atmospheric pressure gauge and found it out of use, a sign that we had attained an altitude beyond the atmosphere of Mercury, and were now in empty space. We turned to the planet, whose enormous disc, muffled in cloud, was shining lividly in the weird sky.
The percolations from above are heated to steam by stones rich in 'grough brimstone. Here it was that Humboldt saw apparent lateral shiftings and perpendicular oscillations of fixed stars; and our Admiralty, not wishing to be behind him, directed Professor P. Smyth's attention to 'scintillations in general. Only the youngest of travellers would use such a place as an observatory; and only the youngest of observers would have considered this libration of the stars an extraordinary phenomenon.
Cassini, an Italian by birth, was the best known of the astronomers, and, in consequence, posterity has very generally supposed he was the director. That he failed to secure that honor was not from any want of astuteness. It is related that the monarch once visited the observatory to see a newly discovered comet through the telescope. He inquired in what direction the comet was going to move.
Again, on December 2, 1898, Venus being 1° 45' from the sun's centre, Mr. H. N. Russell, of the Halsted Observatory, descried the coalescence of the cusps, and founded on the observation a valuable discussion of such effects.
In France the splendid sun-pictures obtained by Dr. Janssen at the Physical Observatory of Meudon have thrown into the shade all other attempts at a photographic study of the most delicate features of the solar surface. Dr.
Thus, from 606 measures of Venus on the sun, taken with a new kind of heliometer at Santiago in Chili, M. Houzeau, of the Brussels Observatory, derived a solar parallax of 8.907", and a distance of 91,727,000 miles. But the "probable errors" of this determination amounted to 0.084" either way: it was subject to a "more or less" of 900,000, or to a total uncertainty of 1,800,000 miles.
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.
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