and true love of progress is proved.

I now hasten to say that I am persuaded that the proposition voted for
at Rome was neither made nor suggested by England, but I doubt whether
it would render a true service to the English nation if it be agreed
to. An immense majority of the navies of the world navigate with
English charts; that is true, and it is a practical compliment to the
great maritime activity of that nation. When this freely admitted
supremacy shall be transformed into an official and compulsory
supremacy, it will suffer the vicissitudes of all human power, and
that institution, (the common meridian,) which by its nature is of a
purely scientific nature, and to which we would assure a long and
certain future, will become the object of burning competition and
jealousy among nations.

All this shows, gentlemen, how much wiser it would be to take for the
origin of terrestrial longitude a point chosen from geographical
considerations only. Upon the globe, nature has so sharply separated
the continent on which the great American nation has arisen, that
there are only two solutions possible from a geographical point of
view, both of them very natural.

The first solution would consist in returning, with some small
modification, to the solution of the ancients, by placing our meridian
near the Azores; the second by throwing it back to that immense
expanse of water which separates America from Asia, where on its
northern shores the New World abuts on the old.

These two solutions may be discussed; this has been often done, and
again quite recently, by one of our ablest geologists, M. de
Chancourtois.

Each of these meridians combine the fundamental conditions which
geography demands and upon which there has always been an agreement
when national meridians are set aside from the discussion. As to the
determination of the position of the point which may be adopted, the
present excellent astronomical methods will give it with a degree of
exactness as great as that which geography requires.

But what is the necessity for a special and costly determination of
the longitude of a point which can be fixed arbitrarily, provided this
be done within certain limits, as for instance by satisfying the
conditions of passing through a strait or an island. We may be content
with fixing the position of the point adopted in an approximate
manner. The position thus obtained would be connected with certain of
the great observat