Meanwhile, the heavy national disasters with which Germany was overwhelmed in the early part of the nineteenth century seemed to stimulate rather than impede the intellectual revival already for some years in progress there. Astronomy was amongst the first of the sciences to feel the new impulse. By the efforts of Bode, Olbers, Schröter, and Von Zach, just and elevated ideas on the subject were propagated, intelligence was diffused, and a firm ground prepared for common action in mutual sympathy and disinterested zeal. They received powerful aid through the foundation, in 1804, by a young artillery officer named Von Reichenbach, of an Optical and Mechanical Institute at Munich. Here the work of English instrumental artists was for the first time rivalled, and that of English opticians--when Fraunhofer entered the new establishment--far surpassed. The development given to the refracting telescope by this extraordinary man was indispensable to the progress of that fundamental part of astronomy which consists in the exact determination of the places of the heavenly bodies. Reflectors are brilliant engines of discovery, but they lend themselves with difficulty to the prosaic work of measuring right ascensions and polar distances. A signal improvement in the art of making and working flint-glass thus most opportunely coincided with the rise of a German school of scientific mechanicians, to furnish the instrumental means needed for the reform which was at hand. Of the leader of that reform it is now time to speak.