, the first feeling is that of isolation. There is a
curious stillness about the place, and the foot-step of the old
pensioner, who closes the gate upon a visitor, echoes again on the
pavement as he goes away to wake up from his astronomical or
meteorological trance one of the officers of this sanctum. Soon, under
the guidance of the good genius so invoked, the secrets of the place
begin to reveal themselves.

The part of the Observatory so conspicuous from without is the portion
least used within. When it was designed by Christopher Wren, the general
belief was that such buildings should be lofty, that the observer might
be raised toward the heavenly bodies whose motions he was to watch. More
modern science has taught its disciples better; and in Greenwich--which
is an eminently practical Observatory--the working part of the building
is found crouching behind the loftier towers. These are now occupied as
subsidiary to the modern practical building. The ground floor is used as
a residence by the chief astronomer; above is the large hall originally
built to contain huge moveable telescopes and quadrants--such as are not
now employed. Nowadays, this hall occasionally becomes a sort of
scientific counting-house--irreverent but descriptive term--in which,
from time to time, a band of scientific clerks are congregated to post
up the books, in which the daily business of the planets has been jotted
down by the astronomers who watch those marvelous bodies. Another
portion is a kind of museum of astronomical curiosities. Flamstead and
Halley, and their immediate successors, worked in these towers, and here
still rest some of the old, rude tools with which their discoveries were
completed, and their reputation, and the reputation of Greenwich, were
established. As time has gone on, astronomers and opticians have
invented new, and more perfect, and more luxurious instruments. Greater
accuracy is thus obtainable, at a less expenditure of human patience and
labor; and so the old tools are cast aside. One of them belonged to
Halley, and was put up by him a hundred and thirty years ago; another
is an old brazen quadrant, with which many valuable observations were
made in by-gone times; and another, an old iron quadrant, still fixed in
the stone pier to which it was first attached. Some of the huge
telescopes that once found place in this old Observatory, have been sent
away. One went to the Cape of Good Hope, and has been useful there