ot no further encouragement at home to pursue
his work. The first recognition of his genius came from England,
the agent being Rev. W. R. Dawes, an enthusiastic observer of double
stars, who was greatly interested in having the best of telescopes.
Mr. Clark wrote him a letter describing a number of objects which
he had seen with telescopes of his own make. From this description
Mr. Dawes saw that the instruments must be of great excellence, and
the outcome of the matter was that he ordered one or more telescopes
from the American maker. Not until then were the abilities of the
latter recognized in his own country.

I have often speculated as to what the result might have been had
Mr. Clark been a more enterprising man. If, when he first found
himself able to make a large telescope, he had come to Washington,
got permission to mount his instrument in the grounds of the capitol,
showed it to members of Congress, and asked for legislation to
promote this new industry, and, when he got it, advertised himself
and his work in every way he could, would the firm which he founded
have been so little known after the death of its members, as it
now unhappily is? This is, perhaps, a rather academic question,
yet not an unprofitable one to consider.

In recent years the firm was engaged only to make object glasses
of telescopes, because the only mountings they could be induced to
make were too rude to satisfy astronomers. The palm in this branch
of the work went to the firm of Warner & Swasey, whose mounting of
the great Yerkes telescope of the University of Chicago is the last
word of art in this direction.

During the period when the reputation of the Cambridge family was
at its zenith, I was slow to believe that any other artist could
come up to their standard. My impression was strengthened by a
curious circumstance. During a visit to the Strasburg Observatory
in 1883 I was given permission to look through its great telescope,
which was made by a renowned German artist. I was surprised to find
the object glass affected by so serious a defect that it could not be
expected to do any work of the first class. One could only wonder
that European art was so backward. But, several years afterward,
the astronomers discovered that, in putting the glasses together after
being cleaned, somebody had placed one of them in the wrong position,
the surface which should have been turned toward the star being now
turned toward the