Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/337

Rh States in extending the boundaries of scientific knowledge, especially in the physical and chemical departments, have been set forth. "We must acknowledge with shame our inferiority to other people," says one. "We have done nothing," says another. Well, if all this be true, we ought perhaps to look to the condition of our colleges for an explanation. But we must not forget that many of these humiliating accusations are made by persons who are not of authority in the matter; who, because they are ignorant of what has been done, think that nothing has been done. They mistake what is merely a blank in their own information for a blank in reality. In their alacrity to depreciate the merit of their own country, a most unpatriotic alacrity, they would have us confess that for the last century we have been living on the reputation of Franklin and his thunder-rod.

Perhaps, then, we may without vanity recall some facts that may relieve us in a measure from the weight of this heavy accusation. We have sent out expeditions of exploration both to the Arctic and Antarctic seas. We have submitted our own coast to an hydrographic and geodesic survey, not excelled in exactness and extent by any similar works elsewhere. In the accomplishment of this we have been compelled to solve many physical problems of the greatest delicacy and highest importance, and we have done it successfully. The measuring-rods with which the three great base-lines of Maine, Long Island, Georgia, were determined, and their beautiful mechanical appliances, have exacted the publicly-expressed admiration of some of the greatest European philosophers, and the conduct of that survey their unstinted applause. We have instituted geological surveys of many of our States and much of our Territories, and have been rewarded not merely by manifold local benefits, but also by the higher honor of extending very greatly the boundaries of that noble science. At an enormous annual cost we have maintained a meteorological-signal system, which I think is not equaled and certainly is not surpassed in the world. Should it be said that selfish interests have been mixed up with some of these undertakings, we may demand whether there was any selfishness in the survey of the Dead Sea? Was there any selfishness in that mission which a citizen of New York sent to equatorial Africa for the finding and relief of Livingstone, any in the astronomical expedition to South America, any in that to the valley of the Amazon? Was there any in the sending out of parties for the observation of the total eclipses of the sun? It was by American astronomers that the true character of his corona was first determined. Was there any in the seven expeditions that were dispatched for observing the transit of Venus? Was it not here that the bi-partition of Bela'sBiela's [sic] comet was first detected, here that the eighth satellite of Saturn was discovered, here that the dusky ring of that planet, which had escaped the penetrating eye of Herschel and all the great European astronomers, was first seen? Was it not by an American telescope that the companion