The first regular observatory in the Southern Hemisphere was founded at
Paramatta by Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane in 1821. The Royal
Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope was completed in 1829. Similar
establishments were set to work by the East India Company at Madras,
Bombay, and St. Helena, during the first third of the nineteenth
century. The organisation of astronomy in the United States of America
was due to a strong wave of popular enthusiasm. In 1825 John Quincy
Adams vainly urged upon Congress the foundation of a National
Observatory; but in 1843 the lectures on celestial phenomena of Ormsby
MacKnight Mitchel stirred an impressionable audience to the pitch of
providing him with the means of erecting at Cincinnati the first
astronomical establishment worthy the name in that great country. On the
1st of January, 1882, no less than one hundred and forty-four were
active within its boundaries.

The apparition of the great comet of 1843 gave an additional fillip to
the movement. To the excitement caused by it the Harvard College
Observatory--called the "American Pulkowa"--directly owed its origin;
and the example was not ineffective elsewhere. The United States Naval
Observatory was built in 1844, Lieutenant Maury being its first
Director. Corporations, universities, municipalities, vied with each
other in the creation of such institutions; private subscriptions poured
in; emissaries were sent to Europe to purchase instruments and to
procure instruction in their use. In a few years the young Republic was,
in point of astronomical efficiency, at least on a level with countries
where the science had been fostered since the dawn of civilisation.

A vast widening of the scope of astronomy has accompanied, and in part
occasioned, the great extension of its area of cultivation which our age
has witnessed. In the last century its purview was a comparatively
narrow one. Problems lying beyond the range of the solar system were
almost unheeded, because they seemed inscrutable. Herschel first showed
the sidereal universe as accessible to investigation, and thereby
offered to science new worlds--majestic, manifold, "infinitely infinite"
to our apprehension in number, variety, and extent--for future conquest.
Their gradual appropriation has absorbed, and will long continue to
absorb, the powers which it has served to develop.

But this is not the only direction in which astronomy has enlarged, or
rather has levelled, its bou