Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/635

Rh of tobacco has become a positive vice. The wastefulness of money which it causes, without a compensatory advantage, is alone deplorable.—Chambers's Journal.



E this month present to our readers the portrait of First Assistant of the United States Coast Survey, and President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the meeting in Detroit, which takes place on the 11th of August of the present year. Mr. Hilgard was born in January, 1825, in the town of Zweibrücken, in Bavaria, where his father hold the position of Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Palatinate of the Rhine. At the age of nine years he came to the United States with his father, who settled on a farm near Belleville, Illinois, where his education, classical and mathematical, was continued by parental instruction, aided by the part he took in the education of several younger brothers. At the age of eighteen he went to Philadelphia, and pursued the study of civil engineering under the advice of such eminent engineers as Roberts and Trautwine. His ardent desire for knowledge attracted the attention of Dr. Patterson, Prof. Bache, and other members of the Philosophical Society; and, soon after Prof. Bache took charge of the Coast Survey, he attached young Hilgard to the corps of assistants which he was about to form, and which, under his training, has attained so eminent a position as a scientific body. Hilgard was soon recognized as one of the leading spirits of the work, and by zeal in active service, untiring application, and the improvement wrought in all branches of the work that he touched, rose to the position of Chief of the Bureau of the Coast Survey at headquarters in Washington. To this position, which he holds at the present time, he was assigned at the beginning of the war of the rebellion, which called forth the best efforts of every member of the Coast Survey, and brought into play its resources of important information gathered during previous years.

Mr. Hilgard's scientific work has chiefly been in connection with his practical labors, consisting of researches and discussion of results in geodesy and terrestrial physics, and in perfecting methods and instrumental means connected with the same. The annual reports of the Coast Survey contain numerous papers from his hand on the application of the method of least squares to geodesy, on determinations of latitude, azimuth, and longitude; on methods of precision in measuring lengths, and on terrestrial magnetism. In 1872 he executed, in connection with the telegraphic determination of the longitude between America and Europe through the French cable, a similar 