Edward Charles Pickering, the present director of the observatory, was appointed in 1876. He was born in Boston and is of the Essex family of the name, Colonel Timothy Pickering being his great-grandfather. He is a graduate of the Lawrence Scientific School of the class of 1865. During the next two years he was a teacher of mathematics in that department of Harvard University. Later and up to the time of his appointment as director, he was professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A system of teaching physics called the “laboratory method” was introduced by him there, and his text book illustrative of the method has to a great extent been adopted by like institutes. Astronomy, as a department of physics, came into the general course, and the attention necessarily given, for the purposes of instruction in the institute, to the technics of that subject, and to demonstration, served as preparation and discipline for the official responsibilities which he afterwards assumed. He was a member of the Nautical Almanac party for observing in Iowa the total solar eclipse of 1869, and was in like service in the following year as a member of the United States Coast Survey party which observed in Spain a recurrence of that event. When he came to the directorship he found the observatory to be well equipped as to instruments and its small working force efficiently employed. Their number was but five or six, which was all the means of the institution permitted of. Like pecuniary restrictions continued until 1879, when a subscription was completed providing for the institution, $5000 annually for five years. Since then much larger gifts have been bestowed and the instrumental equipment, in recent years especially, has been whatever the latest demands or suggestions of science called for; the observatory staff has been augmented from time to time, till it now numbers about 40 persons, and the field of observation has been extended to include the southern hemisphere of stars. Upon the premises at Cambridge where in 1876 stood only the main observatory and a lesser adjunct structure are now eight or ten others, a cluster of small wooden buildings, domed or otherwise adapted for astronomical uses, each containing a costly instrument of the most approved device; and besides these a dwelling house has been transformed into a hall, or rather a workshop of photography, and makes the northernmost structure of the little city of science which has been set upon Summer House hill.