George Phillips Bond was the second director of Harvard College observatory, being the successor of his father, Prof. W. C. Bond. The date of his appointment was 1859. He was born in Dorchester, Mass., May 20, 1825, and graduated at Harvard in 1845. Thenceforth until his decease Feb. 17, 1865, he was in the constant service of the observatory. Prior to his taking the chief office his labors as assistant had gained for him a professional reputation; he had shared with his father the heavy task of organizing the observatory and carrying it on with slender means; he was familiar with its routine, and both by academical and practical training was peculiarly qualified for the position. His professional record therefore is not to be limited to his own term as director. The computations required in the preparation of the three early volumes of the annals were to a great extent his work, and those pertaining to the chronometric expeditions between Boston and Liverpool, were wholly by him. He was the discoverer of the dark interior ring of Saturn, one of the first revelations of the great telescope, and discoverer also, as already stated, of ten comets within a brief period of years. In this cometary work it was his practice to sweep the whole visible heavens once every month. His observations of Saturn led to the adoption of a new theory as to the constitution of the rings. During his term systematic observations were made of certain nebulæ, particularly that in Orion. He conducted a series of zone observations of faint stars near the equator, prepared a plan of observation and reduction, and with his own hand graduated the mica scales used in the work. In 1860 he made an investigation of the brightness of certain celestial objects, including the moon and the planets, the results of which have a special value but are not identified with the Harvard photometrical series of later years, which relates to fixed stars only. During his term the formation of a star catalogue was begun, the observations being made with the meridian circle and in right ascension only, and much progress was made in picturing celestial objects by the camera, the process having, with the disuse of Daguerre’s particular method, gained the generic name of photography. The prestige of the beginning and early successes of astronomical photography attaches to the administration of the senior Bond; but his son shared fully in the labors of thought, contrivance and manipulation by which the original experiments were conducted, and in appreciation of the future possibilities to science in this new method of observation. One evidence of this appears in a paper read by the younger Mr. Bond before the American Academy on May 12, 1857, the immediate occasion for its presentation being a most significant discovery made at the observatory a few days earlier.