r; established in a community
to whose intelligence and generosity its support may be safely confided,
and whose educational institutions are rapidly realizing the conception
of a university; countenanced by the gentleman who conducts the United
States Coast Survey with such scientific skill and administrative
energy; committed to the immediate supervision of an astronomer to whose
distinguished talent had been added the advantage of a thorough
scientific education in the most renowned universities of Europe, and
who, as the editor of the _American Astronomical Journal_, has shown
himself to be fully qualified for the high trust;--under these favorable
circumstances, the Dudley Observatory at Albany takes its place among
the scientific foundations of the country and the world.

WONDERS OF ASTRONOMY.

It is no affected modesty which leads me to express the regret that this
interesting occasion could not have taken place under somewhat different
auspices. I feel that the duty of addressing this great and enlightened
assembly, comprising so much of the intelligence of the community and of
the science of the country, ought to have been elsewhere assigned; that
it should have devolved upon some one of the eminent persons, many of
whom I see before me, to whom you have been listening the past week,
who, as observers and geometers, could have treated the subject with a
master's power; astronomers, whose telescopes have penetrated the depths
of the heavens, or mathematicians, whose analysis unthreads the maze of
their wondrous mechanism. If, instead of commanding, as you easily could
have done, qualifications of this kind, your choice has rather fallen on
one making no pretensions to the honorable name of a man of
science,--but whose delight it has always been to turn aside from the
dusty paths of active life, for an interval of recreation in the green
fields of sacred nature in all her kingdoms,--it is, I presume, because
you have desired on an occasion of this kind, necessarily of a popular
character, that those views of the subject should be presented which
address themselves to the general intelligence of the community, and not
to its select scientific circles. There is, perhaps, no branch of
science which to the same extent as astronomy exhibits phenomena which,
while they task the highest powers of philosophical research, are also
well adapted to arrest the attention of minds barely tinctured w