Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/717

Rh of Grote, which Challis quotes in favor of his own: 'Its fruitfulness is its correctibility.' Instead of being disheartened by difficulties, the true man of science will congratulate himself in the words of Vauvenargues, that he lives in a world fertile in obstacles. Immortality would be no boon if there were not something left to discover as well as to love!"

M. W. C. Bond started a private observatory at his house in Dorchester, where he observed eclipses and occultations, as far back as 1820. In 1840 he was induced by President Quincy to remove to Cambridge with his transit-instrument and other appointments, which were supplemented by some telescopes, sextants, etc., belonging to the college. Prof. Lovering was associated with him in the management of this primitive observatory. Its location was in a private house belonging to the college, in which Mr. Bond and Prof. Lovering took up their residence. Humboldt had induced the Royal Society of London to co-operate in making simultaneous observations on the elements of terrestrial magnetism in Great Britain and its colonies. The only stations on this Western Continent were at Toronto, Canada, and in Philadelphia and Cambridge. Prof. Bache, afterward Chief of the United States Coast Survey, conducted the observations in Philadelphia. Mr. Bond and Prof. Lovering had charge of the observations in Cambridge. These observations were to be made simultaneously all over the earth, and with instruments constructed according to the Gauss pattern. Cambridge was supplied with a set of these instruments by the generosity of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

As, on one day of each month, observations were to be made every five minutes on three different instruments, day and night, for the purpose of obtaining the curves of diurnal variation in the magnetic elements, the assistance of a few competent and zealous undergraduates was freely offered and gladly accepted. Of these, Thomas Hill, afterward President of Harvard College, and Benjamin A. Gould, now the distinguished astronomer, deserve special mention. Prof. Benjamin Peirce rendered valuable service, not only by assisting in the observations on the special days of each month, but in applying the Gauss theory to the calculation of the magnetic elements for Cambridge. Mr. Hill was employed in reducing the weekly means to empirical formulæ by the method of Prof. Peirce.

Profs. Peirce and Lovering were co-editors of the "Mathematical Miscellany," published at Cambridge, and devoted to pure and applied mathematics. The essays contributed by Prof. Lovering are enumerated in the annexed catalogue of his publications. A gentleman who has achieved a world-wide reputation in