mers had the same bad weather as ourselves, very few observations of any value being obtained anywhere.

At Torschok we were joined by Struve, and we enjoyed our last thirty miles with him as much as was possible under the circumstances. We were amused by a little incident at Torschok, where a considerable crowd had gathered at the station. The gentlemen of the party went out to get some refreshments, and we noticed that the people stood back to let us pass and looked at us and talked about us with an air of surprise. Struve told us that the crowd had come down from the city to see the American astronomers; and that their surprise was occasioned by the fact that we were not red Indians.

At Ostaschkowo, which we reached about dark, we parted with Struve, who returned to St. Petersburg, while we ourselves, after a delay of an hour or two, went on to Moscow. After a three days' stay in Moscow our route took us viâ Warsaw and Breslau to Berlin. At Warsaw we stopped a day to pay our respects to our patroness, Madame Nieskowski, and to see what we could in so short a time of the notabilia of the old Polish capital-a day well spent. We visited the observatories at Moscow and at Warsaw. But compared with the great observatories which we had recently visited, they are small establishments and present little of peculiar interest.

From Berlin we hastened viâ Cologne (where we spent Sunday) to London; and on the afternoon of the 31st, exactly according to programme, I was quietly in Manchester, in the house of Mr. Thomas Ashton, who some months before had been so kind as to invite me to be his guest during the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. My host was a fine specimen of the Manchester manufacturer and merchant, and my heart went out to him especially because he was one of those Lancashire men who in the dark days of our Civil War stood by us unflinchingly, at a time when such fidelity to principle was very costly.

The week was one of great enjoyment: excepting the abominable weather everything was satisfactory. I listened to

many important and interesting papers; I met many persons whom I had long desired to know, and renewed old acquaintances; there were receptions, excursions, and garden-parties, and dinner-companies; there was the Mayor's banquet, and the annual gathering of the Red Lions and their "cubs." Then there was the " Jubilee" Exhibition, with its wonderful collection of pictures by the English artists of the Victorian reign.

One great privilege remained to be enjoyed. The Earl of Rosse, who had been in Princeton and whom I met in company several times during the week, kindly invited Professor Rowland and myself to go with him to Birr Castle and spend a day or two there, before our return to America. It would take too long to explain how my friend Professor R., by the stupidity of a railway servant at Liverpool, lost his baggage at Holyhead, and was obliged to give up the trip; but I was more fortunate, and after a railway ride from Dublin to Parsonstown, made interesting by Lord Rosse's conversation, we arrived at the castle on Friday noon. The afternoon was spent in roaming about the grounds and castle, and examining the instruments and the workshop. The castle itself is extremely interesting.

It is a fine old building, or pile of buildings rather-in parts very ancient, for Birr Castle was already old and famous when Henry II. gave it to Philip de Worcester, more than 700 years ago. About 1610 James I., in settling the affairs of Ireland, bestowed it upon Sir Lawrence Parsons, from whom it has descended to its present owners, though not always peacefully; for during the period of the civil wars, between 1640 and 1690, it was several times besieged and captured. More recently, within the present century, but I do not know the date, it was partly burned, and of course, while in the main the ancient aspect has been preserved, the interior has been much modernized.

The lawn in front of the castle is fortified by light earthworks, and there was a sixpounder field-piece in the hall behind the front door; reminiscences, I believe, of the troublous times a century ago. The grounds and gardens are ex

tensive and beautiful, with fine old trees, and two little rivers which come dancing down from the hills, and at the meeting of the waters join in a wider and more placid stream which glides on to the Shannon a few miles below.

To an astronomer, of course the chief interest of the place lies in the colossal telescopes, which were constructed by the father of the present earl nearly fifty years ago, and in his hands and those of his son, have contributed so much to our knowledge of the nebulæ, and to some branches of astronomical physics. There are three of them, all reflectors: one 18 inches in diameter which is mounted in a dome of its own, one 3 feet in diameter, and the "Leviathan," of six feet aperture and nearly sixty feet in length, incomparably the most immense of all astronomical instruments, though probably in real power such great refractors as the Pulkowa telescope and that of the Lick Observatory would overmatch it. The smaller instruments have been pretty much reconstructed during recent years, and the three-foot telescope especially, as regards everything except the speculum, is far more the work of the present owner than of his father. Its equatorial

mounting is of a pattern quite unique, and the arrangement by which the observer is enabled to reach the eyepiece is extremely ingenious. He stands in a sort of cage or basket which hangs from the arm of a crane that swings him around into the necessary position.

The mounting of the great telescope has also received some really important improvements of late, but they are not very conspicuous, and in the main its general appearance is the same as when first erected in 1842. In all these instruments the great concave mirror (which answers to the object-glass of a refractor) is made, not of silvered glass, as is now common, but of metal, and the speculum of the great instrument weighs nearly four tons.

At dinner time the sky was cloudy and threatening, but soon after dark it cleared away, and I had the great good fortune to be able to realize a dream of my boyhood by actually "looking through Lord Rosse's telescope." We examined with the 6-foot reflector a few stars and a number of nebulæ, and although the mirror was not quite in its best condition (not having been repolished for several years), I was agreeably