In a paper on the "Aspects of American Astronomy," Prof. Newcomb says, "A great telescope is of no use without a man at the end of it, and what the telescope may do depends more upon this appendage than upon the instrument itself. The place which telescopes and observatories have taken in astronomical history are by no means proportional to their dimensions. Many a great instrument has been a mere toy in the hands of its owner. Many a small one has become famous. Twenty years ago there was here in your city [Chicago] a modest little instrument which, judged by its size, could not hold up its head with the great ones even of that day. It was the private property of a young man holding no scientific position and scarcely known to the public. And yet that little telescope is to-day among the famous ones of the world, having made memorable advances in the astronomy of double stars, and shown its owner to be a worthy successor of the Herschels and Struves in that line of work."[513] Here Prof. Newcomb evidently refers to Prof. Burnham, and the 6-inch telescope with which he made many of his remarkable discoveries of double stars. With reference to Burnham's work, Prof. Barnard says-- "It represents the labour of a struggling amateur, who during the day led the drudging life of a stenographer in the United States court in Chicago, and at night worked among the stars for the pure love of it. Such work deserves an everlasting fame, and surely this has fallen to Mr. Burnham." Admiral Smyth says-- "A man may prove a good astronomer without possessing a spacious observatory: thus Kepler was wont to observe on the bridge at Prague; Schröter studied the moon, and Harding found a planet from a _gloriette_; while Olbers discovered two new planets from an attic of his house."[514] It is probably not generally known that "some of the greatest astronomers of modern times, such as Kepler, Newton, Hansen, Laplace, and Leverrier, scarcely ever looked through a telescope."[515] Kepler, who always signed himself Keppler in German, is usually supposed to have been born on December 21, 1571, in the imperial town of Weil, but according to Baron von Breitschwert,[516] he was really born on December 27, 1571, in the village of Magstadt in Wurtemberg. According to Lieut. Winterhalter, M. Perrotin of the Nice Observatory declared "that two hours' work with a large instrument is as fatiguing as eight with a small one, the labour involved increasing in proportion to the cube of the aperture, the chances of seeing decreasing in the same ratio, while it can hardly be said that the advantages increase in like proportion."[517] The late Mr. Proctor has well said--