Let us return for a moment to the 1840’s and John Brashear, the 9-year-old Pennsylvania boy who, was given his first opportunity of looking through a small refractor telescope by its maker, Squire Wampler of McKeesport. Brashear became a professional machinist, but retained an interest in astronomy which led him to make a 5-inch achromatic refractor in 1872 and subsequently to show the instrument to Samuel Pierpont Langley,[9] then director of the Allegheny Observatory. With Langley’s encouragement Brashear went on to construct a 12-inch reflector and in 1880 decided to make a business of telescope-making. He subsequently made, among other telescopes, a 30-inch refractor in 1906 for the Allegheny Observatory and in 1918 a 72-inch reflector, at Victoria, British Columbia. Brashear’s greatest fame, however, came from his accessory instruments—spectroscopes and the like. Not the least thrilling aspect of the story of the spectacular ascendancy of American-made telescopes is the story of their financing—of the big-telescope era in American philanthropy and the financial giants (Lick, Hooker, Thaw, Yerkes, and others) who peopled it. In the biography of our third telescope-maker, John Peate, we see at once the persistence of the amateur and the difficulty of his position at the end of the 19th century. Peate, too, may have acquired his interest in astronomy during the years just before 1845. It has been surmised that he was inspired by the sensation created by the comet of 1843, but it is more likely that his interest resulted from visits to European observatories while he was on a walking tour in 1859. Unlike our other amateurs, he did not change his profession (he was a Methodist minister), being certainly at less liberty to do so, but he adapted his hobby to it in an interesting way. Peate was something of a poor man’s philanthropist, and his fame would have been no greater than that role customarily brings had he not undertaken in 1893 the astonishingly audacious project of making the largest glass reflector that had ever been built. In this project he assumes, like his English contemporary A. A. Common, a position intermediate between the makers of giant metallic specula, Herschel and Rosse, and the makers of the California glass reflectors of the 20th century.[10] In a professional telescope-maker of the end of the 19th century, Peate’s accomplishment would have been remarkable. In an amateur it is amazing. It detracts nothing from Peate to reveal, as does the sketch printed here, that the accolade which this project deserves (but has never received) belongs in part to George Howard and the Standard Plate Glass Company. His example and theirs encourage us to hope that the day of the amateur in science may not be at an end. _I._ Amasa Holcomb, 1787-1875