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"One observatory is so much like another that it does not seem worth while to describe Father Secchi's. Secchi had no staff, and no prescribed duties. The base of the observatory was the solid foundation of the old Roman building. The church was built in 1650, and the monastery in part at that time, certainly the dome of the room in which was the meridian instrument.
"From the Hall of Sopre Minerva you make but two turns through short streets to the Fontenelle de Borghese, in the rear of which stands the present observatory. "Indeed, if a cardinal should, at the Hall of Sopre Minerva, call out to Secchi, 'Watchman, what of the night? Secchi could hear the question; and no bolder views emanate from any observatory than those which Secchi sends out.
His comparative failure, however, was a prelude to others' success. Almost simultaneously, in 1862, the novel line of investigation was entered upon by Huggins near London, by Father Secchi at Rome, and by Lewis M. Rutherfurd in New York.
When Galileo directed his telescope to the heavens, when Secchi and Huggins studied the chemistry of the stars by means of the spectroscope, and when Warren De la Rue set up a photoheliograph at Kew, we see that a progress in the same direction as before, in the evolution of our conception of the universe, was being made.
I know the work of Beaumarchais, Eglantine, Mercier, Chenier, and many others of our contemporaries. Then I have read, of course, Moliere, Racine, Corneille, besides many other lesser French writers. Of foreign authors, I am intimate with the works of Gozzi, Goldoni, Guarini, Bibbiena, Machiavelli, Secchi, Tasso, Ariosto, and Fedini.
In that year the track of totality crossed Spain, and thither, accordingly, Warren de la Rue transported his photo-heliograph, and Father Secchi his six-inch Cauchoix refractor. The question then primarily at issue was that relating to the nature of the red protuberances.
Yet the main track is plainly continuous, and leads by insensible gradations from nebulæ through helium stars to the Sirian, and onward to the solar type, whence, by an inevitable transition, fluted, or "Antarian," spectra develop. The first-known examples of the class of gaseous stars Beta Lyræ and Gamma Cassiopeiæ were noticed by Father Secchi at the outset of his spectroscopic inquiries.
Gigi Secchi, the peasant from Aquaviva in the lower forest, brought a bag of corn to the mill to-day, and he told the miller, and the miller told Ettore, and Ettore told Nino, and Nino told " "What the devil did he tell him?" interrupted old Saracinesca.
Among the names identified with the recent progress of astronomy are Sir John Herschel and A. Herschel, Maxwell, Struve, Secchi, Bessel, Bond, Peirce, Newton, Newcomb, Young, Lockyer, Schiaparelli. PROGRESS IN CHEMISTRY. In chemistry the major part of the more rare elements have been discovered since the century began.
He told me that the younger man was a young religieux, and the two turned and went back with me. "I recalled, as I saw Father Secchi, an anecdote I had heard, no way to his credit, except for ingenious trickery. It was said that coming to America he brought with him the object-glass of a telescope, at a time when scientific apparatus paid a high duty.
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