Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/424

408 Mr. Loomis, with such means as were at his command, observed its place and computed its orbit. In the same year he computed, from observations of Polaris and of moon culminations, the latitude and longitude of the Athenaeum tower—the longitude to within less than two seconds of the best determinations of the present.

In September, 1838, in a small observatory he had constructed at Hudson, Ohio, he began observations with the instruments—a four-inch equatorial, a transit instrument, and an astronomical clock—which he had bought in Europe. They were made upon culminations and occultations of the moon for longitude, on Polaris for latitude, and upon five comets for computations of their orbits. A sixth comet was observed by him at Hudson in 1850. These observations were of much greater relative importance in those small days of astronomy in this country, when the facilities we now enjoy did not exist, than they would be now. While Yale College had a telescope but no observatory, and the Williams College Observatory was used for instruction but not for original work, and while Lieutenant Gillis at Washington, and Mr. Bond at Dorchester, Mass., were only preparing to begin observations in connection with the Wilkes Exploring Expedition, there was, as Prof. Loomis said in his inaugural address at Hudson, in 1838, no place in the United States where astronomical observations were regularly and systematically made. A few years later the first telegraph lines had been set up, and the services of Prof. Loomis and Mr. Sears C. Walker were enlisted by Superintendent Bache, of the Coast Survey, in telegraphic determinations in 1847 and 1848—Prof. Loomis having charge of the end of the line at Jersey City and New York—of the differences of longitude of Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Cambridge. In the next summer (1849) Prof. Loomis assisted in a similar work to connect Hudson with Eastern stations. These observations were made from three to five years before telegraphic methods were first used in Europe.

Prof. Loomis's interest in meteorology, in which his most important work was done, appears to have begun at about the same time his attention was drawn to magnetism and astronomy. He followed the discussions of the rival theories of Mr. Redfield and Prof. Espy, which began about the time of his graduation, and thenceforward made a particular study of the theory of storms. With a set of meteorological instruments bought in Europe he took complete meteorological observations twice a day at Hudson. The examination of the track of a tornado which passed near that place gave him some light respecting the course of the storm-wind and sharpened his desire to learn more about it. He next undertook the discussion of a large storm—that of