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plying and utilizing the laws of heat, force, and vapor laid down by such men as Carnot and Regnault that we now cross the Atlantic in six days. These same laws govern the condensation of vapor in the atmosphere; and I say with confidence that if we ever do learn to make it rain, it will be by accepting and applying them, and not by ignoring or trying to repeal them. How much the indisposition of our government to secure expert scientific evidence may cost it is strikingly shown by a recent example. It expended several million dollars on a tunnel and water-works for the city of Washington, and then abandoned the whole work. Had the project been submitted to a commission of geologists, the fact that the rock-bed under the District of Columbia would not stand the continued action of water would have been immediately reported, and all the money expended would have been saved. The fact is that there is very little to excite popular interest in the advance of exact science. Investigators are generally quiet, unimpressive men, rather diffident, and wholly wanting in the art of interesting the public in their work. It is safe to say that neither Lavoisier, Galvani, Ohm, Regnault, nor Maxwell could have gotten the smallest appropriation through Congress to help make discoveries which are now the pride of our century. They all dealt in facts and conclusions quite devoid of that grandeur which renders so captivating the project of attacking the rains in their aerial stronghold with dynamite bombs. XIII THE ASTRONOMICAL EPHEMERIS AND THE NAUTICAL ALMANAC [Footnote: Read before the U S Naval Institute, January 10, 1879.] Although the Nautical Almanacs of the world, at the present time, are of comparatively recent origin, they have grown from small beginnings, the tracing of which is not unlike that of the origin of species by the naturalist of the present day. Notwithstanding its familiar name, it has always been designed rather for astronomical than for nautical purposes. Such a publication would have been of no use to the navigator before he had instruments with which to measure the altitudes of the heavenly bodies. The earlier navigators seldom ventured out of sight of land, and during the night they are said to have steered by the "Cynosure" or constellation of the Great Bear, a practice which has brought the name of the constellation into our language of the present day to designate an object on which all eye
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