He who is leaving the stage feels that he has only
begun and must leave his successors with more to do than his
predecessors left him.
To us an interesting feature of this progress is the part taken in
it by our own country. The science of our day, it is true, is of
no country. Yet we very appropriately speak of American science
from the fact that our traditional reputation has not been that of
a people deeply interested in the higher branches of intellectual
work. Men yet living can remember when in the eyes of the
universal church of learning, all cisatlantic countries, our own
included, were partes infidelium.
Yet American astronomy is not entirely of our generation. In the
middle of the last century Professor Winthrop, of Harvard, was an
industrious observer of eclipses and kindred phenomena, whose work
was recorded in the transactions of learned societies. But the
greatest astronomical activity during our colonial period was that
called out by the transit of Venus in 1769, which was visible in
this country. A committee of the American Philosophical Society,
at Philadelphia, organized an excellent system of observations,
which we now know to have been fully as successful, perhaps more
so, than the majority of those made on other continents, owing
mainly to the advantages of air and climate.
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