and my
childish confidence was nurtured by nothing less wonderful than books
and theories, experiments and dissertations.

The wonderful beauty of our new surroundings, the strangeness of our
sudden removal from America, the long distances travelled, awoke in me
new thoughts and I readily surrendered myself at times to the incoherent
struggles of my nature, to find someone, something, more responsive to
my young feelings than essays on magnetism, and a man, father though he
was, immersed in demonstrations and problems. It was then that this
distant picture in the days of the fragrant and reviving springtime,
filled me with unutterable and touching ecstacy.

My father, as I had said, fully intended to arrive at some definite
conclusions as to the possibilities of wireless telegraphy. At one end
of the grassy plain I have alluded to, our chief stations were erected
and, at the distance of two miles, almost at the other extremity, we
placed a smaller station. Our whole work was to achieve telegraphic
communication between these points without wires. At night my father
bent his telescopic gaze upon the heavens, and as the earth approached
opposition to Mars in 1884 I remember his eagerness and his repeated
adjurations that if we failed in the task in his lifetime I should
devote my life, separated from all other occupations and indulgences, to
carrying on his designs.

At first he only dimly intimated his great ambition, the union of our
world with others by magnetic waves, but as it slowly assumed a
theoretical certainty he talked more and more boldly of this portentous
and transforming possibility.

I cannot refrain from noticing another important scientific activity of
my father's. It was the use of photography in stellar measurement. As is
well known to photographers, in 1871 Dr. R.L. Maddox used gelatine in
place of collodion from which innovation rose the present system of dry
plate photography. My father had always felt the greatest interest in
the use of photography in astronomy. He was acquainted with the splendid
work done by Chapman for Rutherford, New York, in his careful and
exquisite photographs of the moon. As early as 1850 Whipple of Boston
made photographs of the stars.

It was, however, the incomparable advantages, furnished in speed, by
the dry plate photography which made my father realize early as anyone,
the boundless possibilities thus opened in human attainment for the
penetration of the Sider