Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume IV.djvu/72

 CASSIN CA8SINI of Cassianus in his Vie des peres du desert. He was eventually canonized, and his anniversary, July 23, was long celebrated at Marseilles. The best edition of his collected works is that reprinted at Leipsic in 1733. CASSIA, John, an American ornithologist, born near Chester, Penn., Sept. 6, 1813, died Jan. 10, 1869. In 1834 he took up his residence in Philadelphia, and, excepting a few years par- tially given to mercantile pursuits, devoted him- self to the study of ornithology. He contrib- uted descriptions of new species and synoptical reviews of various families to the " Proceed- ings " and the " Journal " of the Philadelphia academy of natural science. His more elaborate publications are : " Birds of California, Texas," &c. (Philadelphia, 1855); "American Ornitho- logy" (1856), containing descriptions and fig- ures of all North American birds not given by former American authors, after the manner and designed as a continuation of the works of Audubon, with 50 colored plates ; " Mam- malogy and Ornithology of the United States Exploring Expedition ;" " Ornithology of the Japan Expedition ;" " Ornithology of Gilliss's Astronomical Expedition to Chili ;" the chap- ters on rapacious and wading birds in the " Ornithology of the Pacific Railroad Explora- tions and Surveys ;" and the ornithology of the " Iconographic Encyclopaedia." His works are the result of careful research, and are espe- cially valuable for their descriptions and classifi- cations of many birds not given in the previous works of Wilson and Audubon. He was of a Quaker family, several members of which have distinguished themselves in naval and military service. His great-uncle, JOHN CASSIN, a com- modore in the American navy, conducted the defence of Philadelphia in the war of 1812. His uncle, STEPHEN CASSIN (1782-1857), also a commodore, served under Com. Preble in the war with Tripoli, and for his bravery in the action on Lake Champlain in 1814, under Com. McDonough, was rewarded by congress with a gold medal. (ssiM, a family of Italian and French as- tronomers, four members of which were direc- tors of the Paris observatory for the first 122 years of its existence. I. Giovanni Domenlco, born at Perinaldo, near Nice, June 8, 1625, died in Paris, Sept. 14, 1712. While in college at Genoa he gained considerable reputation by his Latin verses ; but his attention having been turned to mathematics, he abandoned poetry. He went to Paris as secretary in the suite of Ler- caro, afterward doge of Genoa, who was then the head of an embassy to the court of Louis XIV. After the return of the embassy he ac- companied Lercaro to his estates in Lombardy, and while there ho devoted some time to the study of astrology, which led him to his lifelong pursuit of astronomy. In 1644, at the invita- tion of the marquis Malvasia, he went to Bo- logna, and in 1650 was appointed professor of astronomy in the university there. The mar- quis had built an observatory at the villa of Pansano near Modena, and here Cassini made observations upon the comet of 1652 from which he published his first work. In the following year the church of St. Petronia in Bologna, where Ignazio Dante in 1575 had es- tablished a meridian line and gnomon, was undergoing repairs, and Cassini obtained the privilege of correcting and lengthening this line. He was very successful, and made ob- servations in regard to the obliquity of the ecliptic, refraction, and parallax, which subse- quent observations have shown to be very close approximations to exactness. In 1656 he pub- lished his tables of the sun founded upon these observations. In 1 657 he was appointed super- intendent of the Po for the city of Bologna, and he was afterward employed in many public du- ties by different cities and by the pope. He also found time to make a great number of ob- servations upon insects, experiments upon the transfusion of blood, a subject which then at- tracted great attention, and to continue his astronomical observations. While at Ferrara he conceived the idea of a chart to represent the different appearances of an eclipse of the sun at various places on the surface of the earth; but the inquisitor of that city forbade its publication on account of its novelty. In 1665, at Citta della Pieve in Tuscany, by means of a telescope furnished by Campani, he observed the shadows thrown upon the surface of Jupiter by his satellites when they pass between the planet and the sun, and distinguished them from the fixed spots. Having compared his own ob- servations with those of Galileo, he constructed his first tables of the satellites. He very nearly approximated the truth in his calculations of the time of rotation of Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and the sun ; and these discoveries exalted his reputation above that of any other astronomer then living. Though they really indicated nothing more than the use of good instru- ments by a careful and accurate observer, yet they were capable of being stated in definite terms which everybody could understand ; and while the sublime discoveries of Copernicus and Newton were slowly struggling for recognition, all Europe was filled with the praises of the man who had laid open and stated in numbers the secrets of the heavens. In 1666 Colbert, chief minister of Louis XIV. of France, founded the royal academy of sciences and projected an observatory. He invited Cassini to take up his residence in Paris, offering him a pension equal to the emoluments of all the offices he held in Italy. Cassini arrived in Paris April 4, 1669, and on Sept. 14, 1671, commenced his observa- tions. In this and the following year he dis- covered the third and fifth satellites of Saturn. In 1673 the Bolognese government requested him to return to that city, but Colbert persuaded him to remain in France. Cassini took out letters of naturalization as a French subject, and the same year married a French lady. Henceforth his time was mostly occupied in making observations and recording their re-