nding the postulated lever of Archimedes as the universe
transcends this speck of earth upon its face; knowledge, the attribute
of Omnipotence, of which man alone, in the physical and material world,
is permitted to anticipate."

Why astronomical science should be the object to which the income of
this fund should be first applied he thus proceeds to set forth:

"The express object of an observatory is the increase of knowledge
by new discovery. The physical relations between the firmament of
heaven and the globe allotted by the Creator of all to be the abode
of man are discoverable only by the organ of the eye. Many of these
relations are indispensable to the existence of human life, and
perhaps of the earth itself. Who, that can conceive the idea of a
world without a sun, but must connect with it the extinction of
light and heat, of all animal life, of all vegetation and
production, leaving the lifeless clod of matter to return to the
primitive state of chaos, or to be consumed by elemental fire? The
influence of the moon--of the planets, our next-door neighbors of
the solar system--of the fixed stars, scattered over the blue
expanse in multitudes exceeding the power of human computation, and
at distances of which imagination herself can form no distinct
conception;--the influence of all these upon the globe which we
inhabit, and upon the condition of man, its dying and deathless
inhabitant, is great and mysterious, and, in the search for final
causes, to a great degree inscrutable to his finite and limited
faculties. The extent to which they are discoverable is and must
remain unknown; but, to the vigilance of a sleepless eye, to the
toil of a tireless hand, and to the meditations of a thinking,
combining, and analyzing mind, secrets are successively revealed,
not only of the deepest import to the welfare of man in his earthly
career, but which seem to lift him from the earth to the threshold
of his eternal abode; to lead him blindfold up to the
council-chamber of Omnipotence, and there, stripping the bandage
from his eyes, bid him look undazzled at the throne of God.

"In the history of the human species, so far as it is known to us,
astronomical observation was one of the first objects of pursuit for
the acquisition of knowledge. In the first chapter of the sacred
volume we are told that, in