A hundred observers might have used the appliances of the Lick Observatory for a whole generation without finding the fifth satellite of Jupiter; without successfully photographing the cloud forms of the Milky Way; without discovering the extraordinary patches of nebulous light, nearly or quite invisible to the human eye, which fill some regions of the heavens. When I was in Zurich last year I paid a visit to the little, but not unknown, observatory of its famous polytechnic school. The professor of astronomy was especially interested in the observations of the sun with the aid of the spectroscope, and among the ingenious devices which he described, not the least interesting was the method of photographing the sun by special rays of the spectrum, which had been worked out at the Kenwood Observatory in Chicago. The Kenwood Observatory is not, I believe, in the eye of the public, one of the noteworthy institutions of your city which every visitor is taken to see, and yet this invention has given it an important place in the science of our day. Should you ask me what are the most hopeful features in the great establishment which you are now dedicating, I would say that they are not alone to be found in the size of your unequalled telescope, nor in the cost of the outfit, but in the fact that your authorities have shown their appreciation of the requirements of success by adding to the material outfit of the establishment the three men whose works I have described. Gentlemen of the trustees, allow me to commend to your fostering care the men at the end of the telescope. The constitution of the astronomer shows curious and interesting features. If he is destined to advance the science by works of real genius, he must, like the poet, be born, not made. The born astronomer, when placed in command of a telescope, goes about using it as naturally and effectively as the babe avails itself of its mother's breast. He sees intuitively what less gifted men have to learn by long study and tedious experiment. He is moved to celestial knowledge by a passion which dominates his nature. He can no more avoid doing astronomical work, whether in the line of observations or research, than a poet can chain his Pegasus to earth. I do not mean by this that education and training will be of no use to him. They will certainly accelerate his early progress. If he is to become great on the mathematical side, not only must his genius have a bend in that direction, but he must have the means of pursuing his studies. And yet I have seen so many failures of men who had the best instruction, and so many successes of men who scarcely learned anything of their teachers, that I sometimes ask whether the great American celestial mechanician of the twentieth century will be a graduate of a university or of the backwoods.