adition than
to found a school. The old ways were dear to him; and, indefatigable as
he was, a definite purpose was wanting to compel him, by its exigencies,
along the path of progress. Thus, for almost fifty years after Bradley's
death, the acquisition of a small achromatic[59] was the only notable
change made in the instrumental equipment of the Observatory. The
transit, the zenith sector, and the mural quadrant, with which Bradley
had done his incomparable work, retained their places long after they
had become deteriorated by time and obsolete by the progress of
invention; and it was not until the very close of his career that
Maskelyne, compelled by Pond's detection of serious errors, ordered a
Troughton's circle, which he did not live to employ.

Meanwhile, the heavy national disasters with which Germany was
overwhelmed in the early part of the nineteenth century seemed to
stimulate rather than impede the intellectual revival already for some
years in progress there. Astronomy was amongst the first of the sciences
to feel the new impulse. By the efforts of Bode, Olbers, Schroeter, and
Von Zach, just and elevated ideas on the subject were propagated,
intelligence was diffused, and a firm ground prepared for common action
in mutual sympathy and disinterested zeal. They received powerful aid
through the foundation, in 1804, by a young artillery officer named Von
Reichenbach, of an Optical and Mechanical Institute at Munich. Here the
work of English instrumental artists was for the first time rivalled,
and that of English opticians--when Fraunhofer entered the new
establishment--far surpassed. The development given to the refracting
telescope by this extraordinary man was indispensable to the progress of
that fundamental part of astronomy which consists in the exact
determination of the places of the heavenly bodies. Reflectors are
brilliant engines of discovery, but they lend themselves with difficulty
to the prosaic work of measuring right ascensions and polar distances. A
signal improvement in the art of making and working flint-glass thus
most opportunely coincided with the rise of a German school of
scientific mechanicians, to furnish the instrumental means needed for
the reform which was at hand. Of the leader of that reform it is now
time to speak.

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was born at Minden, in Westphalia, July 22,
1784. A certain taste for figures, coupled with a still stronger
distaste for the Latin accide