By messages coming in sailing ships it was learned subsequently to September that the comet had been seen in Europe on March 25. Its perihelion passage was September 12, 1811. The elder brother already quoted says of these early days: “I suppose it would cause the astronomer royal to laugh could he see the first transit instrument used by us at Dorchester, a strip of brass nailed to the east end of the house, with a hole in it to see a fixed star and note its transit; this in 1813. When we moved into the Hawes house, he procured a good granite block; we dug a deep hole and placed it at the west end of the house and got Mr. Alger to cast a stand for the transit instrument, a small one, which I think belonged to Harvard College. From this time he began to live among the stars.” The facts thus recorded of the beginning of Mr. Bond’s career show his zeal and watchfulness as an amateur in astronomy, and that up to the date of the comet’s appearance, and later, he had no personal acquaintance with men of science in the vicinity, since he informed none of them of what he had seen. When, months afterwards, Prof. Farrar inquired about it, the young discoverer was able to report from his memoranda no more than the degrees of position, without the minutes and seconds, and to say that he “supposed” the comet to be moving towards the constellation Leo, circumstances indicating that a strip of brass with a hole in it and a home-made boxwood quadrant were all that was astronomically in use at Dorchester as late as 1811. That this experience with the comet was a fortunate turning point in Mr. Bond’s career is evinced by Prof. Farrar’s genial recognition in the paper published in the organ of American Science, where he might excusably have ignored so crude a record as that which was the best Mr. Bond could supply, and by the appearance not long afterwards, at the west end of the Hawes house in Dorchester, of a loaned telescope belonging to Harvard College.