ll as on the astronomers who may be associated with it.
You will, I am sure, pardon me if I make some suggestions on the
subject of the future needs of the establishment. We want this newly
founded institution to be a great success, to do work which shall show
that the intellectual productiveness of your community will not be
allowed to lag behind its material growth The public is very apt to
feel that when some munificent patron of science has mounted a great
telescope under a suitable dome, and supplied all the apparatus which
the astronomer wants to use, success is assured. But such is not the
case. The most important requisite, one more difficult to command than
telescopes or observatories, may still be wanting. A great telescope is
of no use without a man at the end of it, and what the telescope may do
depends more upon this appendage than upon the instrument itself. The
place which telescopes and observatories have taken in astronomical
history are by no means proportional to their dimensions. Many a great
instrument has been a mere toy in the hands of its owner. Many a small
one has become famous.

Twenty years ago there was here in your own city a modest little
instrument which, judged by its size, could not hold up its head with
the great ones even of that day. It was the private property of a young
man holding no scientific position and scarcely known to the public.
And yet that little telescope is to-day among the famous ones of the
world, having made memorable advances in the astronomy of double stars,
and shown its owner to be a worthy successor of the Herschels and
Struves in that line of work.

A hundred observers might have used the appliances of the Lick
Observatory for a whole generation without finding the fifth satellite
of Jupiter; without successfully photographing the cloud forms of the
Milky Way; without discovering the extraordinary patches of nebulous
light, nearly or quite invisible to the human eye, which fill some
regions of the heavens.

When I was in Zurich last year I paid a visit to the little, but not
unknown, observatory of its famous polytechnic school. The professor of
astronomy was especially interested in the observations of the sun with
the aid of the spectroscope, and among the ingenious devices which he
described, not the least interesting was the method of photographing
the sun by special rays of the spectrum, which had been worked out at
the Kenwood Observatory in Chicago.