If at this time Professor Airy had extended his investigations
into yet another field, with a view of determining the prospects
for a great city at the site of Fort Dearborn, on the southern
shore of Lake Michigan, he would have seen as little prospect of
civic growth in that region as of a great development of astronomy
in the United States at large. A plat of the proposed town of
Chicago had been prepared two years before, when the place
contained perhaps half a dozen families. In the same month in
which Professor Airy made his report, August, 1832, the people of
the place, then numbering twenty-eight voters, decided to become
incorporated, and selected five trustees to carry on their
government.
In 1837 a city charter was obtained from the legislature of
Illinois. The growth of this infant city, then small even for an
infant, into the great commercial metropolis of the West has been
the just pride of its people and the wonder of the world. I
mention it now because of a remarkable coincidence. With this
civic growth has quietly gone on another, little noted by the
great world, and yet in its way equally wonderful and equally
gratifying to the pride of those who measure greatness by
intellectual progress.
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