[Footnote A:  Outlines, section 131.]

UTILITY OF ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATIONS.

The object of an observatory, erected and supplied with instruments of this admirable construction, and at proportionate expense, is, as I have already intimated, to provide for an accurate and systematic survey of the heavenly bodies, with a view to a more correct and extensive acquaintance with those already known, and as instrumental power and skill in using it increase, to the discovery of bodies hitherto invisible, and in both classes to the determination of their distances, their relations to each other, and the laws which govern their movements.

Why should we wish to obtain this knowledge?  What inducement is there to expend large sums of money in the erection of observatories, and in furnishing them with costly instruments, and in the support of the men of science employed in making, discussing, and recording, for successive generations, those minute observations of the heavenly bodies?

In an exclusively scientific treatment of this subject, an inquiry into its utilitarian relations would be superfluous—­even wearisome.  But on an occasion like the present, you will not, perhaps, think it out of place if I briefly answer the question, What is the use of an observatory, and what benefit may be expected from the operations of such an establishment in a community like ours?

1.  In the first place, then, we derive from the observations of the heavenly bodies which are made at an observatory, our only adequate measures of time, and our only means of comparing the time of one place with the time of another.  Our artificial time-keepers—­clocks, watches, and chronometers—­however ingeniously contrived and admirably fabricated, are but a transcript, so to say, of the celestial motions, and would be of no value without the means of regulating them by observation.  It is impossible for them, under any circumstances, to escape the imperfection of all machinery the work of human hands; and the moment we remove with our time-keeper east or west, it fails us.  It will keep home time alone, like the fond traveler who leaves his heart behind him.  The artificial instrument is of incalculable utility, but must itself be regulated by the eternal clock-work of the skies.

RELATIONS BETWEEN NATURAL PHENOMENA AND DAILY LIFE.

This single consideration is sufficient to show how completely the daily business of life is affected and controlled by the heavenly bodies.  It is they—­and not our main-springs, our expansion balances, and our compensation pendulums—­which give us our time.  To reverse the line of Pope: 

“’Tis with our watches as our judgments;—­none
Go just alike, but each believes his own.”