specially devoted to it is one of the scientific needs of
our time.

In such an epoch-making age as the present it is dangerous to cite any
one step as making a new epoch. Yet it may be that when the historian
of the future reviews the science of our day he will find the most
remarkable feature of the astronomy of the last twenty years of our
century to be the discovery that this steadfast earth of which the
poets have told us is not, after all, quite steadfast; that the north
and south poles move about a very little, describing curves so
complicated that they have not yet been fully marked out. The periodic
variations of latitude thus brought about were first suspected about
1880, and announced with some modest assurance by Kustner, of Berlin, a
few years later. The progress of the views of astronomical opinion from
incredulity to confidence was extremely slow until, about 1890,
Chandler, of the United States, by an exhaustive discussion of
innumerable results of observations, showed that the latitude of every
point on the earth was subject to a double oscillation, one having a
period of a year, the other of four hundred and twenty-seven days.

Notwithstanding the remarkable parallel between the growth of American
astronomy and that of your city, one cannot but fear that if a foreign
observer had been asked only half a dozen years ago at what point in
the United States a great school of theoretical and practical
astronomy, aided by an establishment for the exploration of the
heavens, was likely to be established by the munificence of private
citizens, he would have been wiser than most foreigners had he guessed
Chicago. Had this place been suggested to him, I fear he would have
replied that were it possible to utilize celestial knowledge in
acquiring earthly wealth, here would be the most promising seat for
such a school. But he would need to have been a little wiser than his
generation to reflect that wealth is at the base of all progress in
knowledge and the liberal arts; that it is only when men are relieved
from the necessity of devoting all their energies to the immediate
wants of life that they can lead the intellectual life, and that we
should therefore look to the most enterprising commercial centre as the
likeliest seat for a great scientific institution.

Now we have the school, and we have the observatory, which we hope will
in the near future do work that will cast lustre on the name of its
founder as we