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