made for a depot for the charts
and instruments of the Navy. On this modest basis has been reared the
National Observatory at Washington; an institution which has already
taken and fully sustains an honorable position among the scientific
establishments of the age.

Besides the institution at Washington, fifteen or twenty observatories
have within the last few years, been established in different parts of
the country, some of them on a modest scale, for the gratification of
the scientific taste and zeal of individuals, others on a broad
foundation of expense and usefulness. In these establishments, public
and private, the means are provided for the highest order of
astronomical observation, research, and instruction. There is already in
the country an amount of instrumental power (to which addition is
constantly making), and of mathematical skill on the part of our men of
science, adequate to a manly competition with their European
contemporaries. The fruits are already before the world, in the
triangulation of several of the States, in the great work of the Coast
Survey, in the numerous scientific surveys of the interior of the
Continent, in the astronomical department of the Exploring Expedition,
in the scientific expedition to Chili, in the brilliant hydrographical
labors of the Observatory at Washington, in the published observations
of Washington and Cambridge, in the Journal conducted by the Nestor of
American Science, now in its eighth lustrum; in the _Sidereal
Messenger_, the _Astronomical Journal_, and the _National Ephemeris_; in
the great chronometrical expeditions to determine the longitude of
Cambridge, better ascertained than that of Paris was till within the
last year; in the prompt rectification of the errors in the predicted
elements of Neptune; in its identification with Lalande's missing star,
and in the calculation of its ephemeris; in the discovery of the
satellite of Neptune, of the eighth satellite of Saturn, and of the
innermost of its rings; in the establishment, both by observation and
theory, of the non-solid character of Saturn's rings; in the separation
and measurement of many double and triple stars, amenable only to
superior instrumental power, in the immense labor already performed in
preparing star catalogues, and in numerous accurate observations of
standard stars; in the diligent and successful observation of the
meteoric showers; in an extensive series of magnetic observations; in
th