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.