necessity, excluded from the Observatory walls, for the place is devoted to the prosecution of a science whose operations are inconsistent with the bustle, the interruptions, the talk, and the anxieties of popular curiosity and examination. But when public information and instruction are the objects, the doors are widely opened, and the press and its _attaches_ find a way into this, as into many other sacred and forbidden spots. Only last week one of "our own contributors" was seen in a carriage on the Greenwich railway, poring over the paper in the last Edinburgh Review that describes our national astronomical establishment, and was known afterward to have climbed the Observatory hill, and to have rung and gained admission at the little, black, mysterious gate in the Observatory wall. Let us see what is told in his report of what he saw within that sacred portal. In the park on a fine day all seems life and gayety--once within the Observatory boundary, the first feeling is that of isolation. There is a curious stillness about the place, and the foot-step of the old pensioner, who closes the gate upon a visitor, echoes again on the pavement as he goes away to wake up from his astronomical or meteorological trance one of the officers of this sanctum. Soon, under the guidance of the good genius so invoked, the secrets of the place begin to reveal themselves. The part of the Observatory so conspicuous from without is the portion least used within. When it was designed by Christopher Wren, the general belief was that such buildings should be lofty, that the observer might be raised toward the heavenly bodies whose motions he was to watch. More modern science has taught its disciples better; and in Greenwich--which is an eminently practical Observatory--the working part of the building is found crouching behind the loftier towers. These are now occupied as subsidiary to the modern practical building. The ground floor is used as a residence by the chief astronomer; above is the large hall originally built to contain huge moveable telescopes and quadrants--such as are not now employed. Nowadays, this hall occasionally becomes a sort of scientific counting-house--irreverent but descriptive term--in which, from time to time, a band of scientific clerks are congregated to post up the books, in which the daily business of the planets has been jotted down by the astronomers who watch those marvelous bodies. Another portion is a kind of museum of astronomical curiosities. Flamstead and Halley, and their immediate successors, worked in these towers, and here still rest some of the old, rude tools with which their discoveries were completed, and their reputation, and the reputation of Greenwich, were established. As time has gone on, astronomers and opticians have invented new, and more perfect, and more luxurious instruments. Greater accuracy is thus obtainable, at a less expenditure of human patience and labor; and so the old tools are cast aside.