plying and utilizing the laws of heat, force, and vapor laid down by
such men as Carnot and Regnault that we now cross the Atlantic in six
days. These same laws govern the condensation of vapor in the
atmosphere; and I say with confidence that if we ever do learn to make
it rain, it will be by accepting and applying them, and not by ignoring
or trying to repeal them.

How much the indisposition of our government to secure expert
scientific evidence may cost it is strikingly shown by a recent
example. It expended several million dollars on a tunnel and
water-works for the city of Washington, and then abandoned the whole
work. Had the project been submitted to a commission of geologists, the
fact that the rock-bed under the District of Columbia would not stand
the continued action of water would have been immediately reported, and
all the money expended would have been saved. The fact is that there is
very little to excite popular interest in the advance of exact science.
Investigators are generally quiet, unimpressive men, rather diffident,
and wholly wanting in the art of interesting the public in their work.
It is safe to say that neither Lavoisier, Galvani, Ohm, Regnault, nor
Maxwell could have gotten the smallest appropriation through Congress
to help make discoveries which are now the pride of our century. They
all dealt in facts and conclusions quite devoid of that grandeur which
renders so captivating the project of attacking the rains in their
aerial stronghold with dynamite bombs.

XIII

THE ASTRONOMICAL EPHEMERIS AND THE NAUTICAL ALMANAC

[Footnote: Read before the U S Naval Institute, January 10, 1879.]

Although the Nautical Almanacs of the world, at the present time, are
of comparatively recent origin, they have grown from small beginnings,
the tracing of which is not unlike that of the origin of species by the
naturalist of the present day. Notwithstanding its familiar name, it
has always been designed rather for astronomical than for nautical
purposes. Such a publication would have been of no use to the navigator
before he had instruments with which to measure the altitudes of the
heavenly bodies. The earlier navigators seldom ventured out of sight of
land, and during the night they are said to have steered by the
"Cynosure" or constellation of the Great Bear, a practice which has
brought the name of the constellation into our language of the present
day to designate an object on which all eye