An organization especially
devoted to it is one of the scientific needs of our time.
In such an epoch-making age as the present it is dangerous to cite
any one step as making a new epoch. Yet it may be that when the
historian of the future reviews the science of our day he will
find the most remarkable feature of the astronomy of the last
twenty years of our century to be the discovery that this
steadfast earth of which the poets have told us is not, after all,
quite steadfast; that the north and south poles move about a very
little, describing curves so complicated that they have not yet
been fully marked out. The periodic variations of latitude thus
brought about were first suspected about 1880, and announced with
some modest assurance by Kustner, of Berlin, a few years later.
The progress of the views of astronomical opinion from incredulity
to confidence was extremely slow until, about 1890, Chandler, of
the United States, by an exhaustive discussion of innumerable
results of observations, showed that the latitude of every point
on the earth was subject to a double oscillation, one having a
period of a year, the other of four hundred and twenty-seven days.
Notwithstanding the remarkable parallel between the growth of
American astronomy and that of your city, one cannot but fear that
if a foreign observer had been asked only half a dozen years ago
at what point in the United States a great school of theoretical
and practical astronomy, aided by an establishment for the
exploration of the heavens, was likely to be established by the
munificence of private citizens, he would have been wiser than
most foreigners had he guessed Chicago.
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