The difficulties thus growing out of
the administration cannot be overestimated. And yet the sixteen
great volumes in which the work of the institution has been
published will rank in the future among the classics of astronomy.
Another wonderful focus of activity, in which one hardly knows
whether he ought most to admire the exhaustless energy or the
admirable ingenuity which he finds displayed, is the Harvard
Observatory. Its work has been aided by gifts which have no
parallel in the liberality that prompted them. Yet without energy
and skill such gifts would have been useless. The activity of the
establishment includes both hemispheres. Time would fail to tell
how it has not only mapped out important regions of the heavens
from the north to the south pole, but analyzed the rays of light
which come from hundreds of thousands of stars by recording their
spectra in permanence on photographic plates.
The work of the establishment is so organized that a new star
cannot appear in any part of the heavens nor a known star undergo
any noteworthy change without immediate detection by the
photographic eye of one or more little telescopes, all-seeing and
never-sleeping policemen that scan the heavens unceasingly while
the astronomer may sleep, and report in the morning every case of
irregularity in the proceedings of the heavenly bodies.
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