It will be two weeks before this rule can be made part of the Sanitary Code, and during that time arguments for and against it will be heard by the Department.

If the Health Board will only follow this rule with another, forbidding the overcrowding of cars, New Yorkers will have a chance of getting comfortable service from the car systems.

* * * * *

We told you about the great Yerkes telescope some little while ago.

It has, if you remember, the largest lens in the world, and with it astronomers can look farther into space than with any other glass now in existence.

At the end of last May the big telescope was in position, and the scientific world waited anxiously to hear of the wonders it would reveal.

Professor Barnard, who is in charge of the observatory, stated that it was impossible even to guess what discoveries might be made with it.

He stated that it allowed the observer to penetrate one-fourth farther into space than the famous Lick telescope.  It was therefore to be supposed that some new knowledge about the moon and the planets would soon be obtainable.

He expected that in the course of a few weeks he would be able to give some new information about the planet Jupiter and its moons, and Saturn and its rings.  He hoped also to give a fuller description of the hills and valleys on the desolate surface of the moon.

Unfortunately his hopes will not be fulfilled for a long time to come.

But eight days after the first peep had been obtained through the great glass, a very unfortunate accident happened in the observatory.

The elevating floor of the telescope gave way, and fell forty feet, to the bottom of the dome.

Two astronomers had been observing the stars the entire night, but happily they had left the building just before the accident occurred.  As good luck would have it, the great telescope was also uninjured, but a great deal of damage was done to the building.

It is estimated that it will take the whole summer to tear out the wreckage and make the repairs.

During that time the telescope cannot be used.  This is a great disappointment to the scientists.

We told you of the labor entailed in the grinding of a lens.

Mr. Alvan G. Clark, the man who made the great glass of which we have been speaking, has just died.

He and his father and brother had devoted their entire lives to the making of telescopes, and made many of the famous glasses of the world.  The great glass at the Lick Observatory, which measures thirty-six inches across, is of their manufacture.

Their greatest triumph was the Yerkes lens, which is forty inches in diameter, and which was completed only a few months before Mr. Clark’s death.

This firm did a great deal to further astronomical research.  Not only did they manufacture such perfect instruments that the possibilities of observing the stars were greatly increased, but they were close students of the science themselves.  Mr. Alvan G. Clark, in particular, made several important discoveries, having found no less than fourteen new stars.