the observatory and telescope at Flagstaff, Arizona, which has since become famous through the work of its Director in studying the Martian canals. For the Harvard Observatory he established in 1891 its permanent southern station at Arequipa, Peru, where the Harvard instruments were able to include the stars of the southern heavens and so complete the work of the northern observatory by making its photographic record embrace the entire firmament. In 1900 he established the Harvard Astronomical Station in Mandeville, Jamaica, for the special purpose of a closer study of the moon's surface. Naturally, too, he has been the leader of various expeditions sent out from Harvard for the study of special phases of astronomy depending on special conditions. He has thus observed eclipses of the sun in Colorado, Grenada, California, Chile, and Georgia individual human nature permits, were scientists in the spirit that Director Pickering describes as superior to any demand except the increase of human knowledge. The true aim, he has said, of the student of science is "the advancement of human knowledge and the determination of the laws regulating the universe. His sole object should be to obtain the best possible results, and he must be ready to make any sacrifice of his personal wishes for this end. As tronomy thus becomes international and wholly impersonal. To how many of us is this the one and only aim, regardless of all selfish considerations? not expect too much of poor human nature, and yet it can do no harm to make our ideal a high one. No man is likely to surpass his ideal, and even if it is so high that he cannot hope to reach it, he may go further than if he tries only for money or fame. The aims of all of which means more than astrothe astronomer thus become the aims of astronomy, and there is no subject to which he can better give careful attention." We must The fact remains, however, that a man must do his work after his own fashion, and in the collaboration of Director Pickering and his brother each cheerfully admits that the other has accomplished a kind of work which his colleague would under any circumstances have done less successfully. If Director Pickering has been responsible for the finding of new stars-and of the new stars discovered in the last two decades nine out of twelve have been located by either Mrs. W. P. Fleming or Miss H. A. Leavitt by examination of the photographic plates at Harvard-Professor Pickering has been responsible for new locations for astronomical observation. Always fond of outdoor exercise, especially walking and mountain-climbing, and equally attracted by travel and change of scene, Professor W. H. Pickering has to his credit the selection of a long list of astronomical stations, some of them chosen for temporary researches by Harvard astronomers and later utilized as permanent locations for other observatories, while others have become permanent stations of the Harvard Observatory. For Professor Percival Lowell he erected nomical knowledge, for it includes knowledge of men, diplomacy, and often the resource and quick decision of the explorer. And incidentally, sometimes without regard to the main issues of astronomy, sometimes in the quest of a good location for an observatory, he has ascended something more than a hundred mountain peaks, including Half Dome in the Yosemite and El Misti in the Andes. Although Professor W. H. Pickering's name is to-day most closely associated with lunar investigation, his actual astronomical work is by no means confined to that planet. His discoveries include the Great Spiral Nebula in Orion; the rotation of Swift's Comet in 1892; the ellipticity and rotation period of the satellites of Jupiter; the ninth and tenth satellites of Saturn; and a long list of lesser miscellaneous discoveries almost any one of which would give his name. a permanent place in the annals of astronomy. As an inventor he has done much to improve and perfect the mechanism of both photographic and visual astronomy-and this, it may be added, with no effort to turn his inventive faculty to commercial purposes. It would be entirely safe to say that no other astronomer has ever supervised the examination, both visually and in the permanence of the photographic negative, of so many stars as the Director of the Harvard Observatory. Few men, if there have been any at all, have looked at the heavens from more observatories where climatic conditions are especially well suited to delicate observation, than Professor W. H. Pickering. As a natural result of such conditions, the work of the older astronomer, permanently located in the midst of his constantly increasing library of star photographs and spending night after night studying the heavens for data as to the physical properties, magnitude, and movements of every visible star, has expressed itself in the accumulation of facts more or less common to the countless shining atoms of the celestial universe; while the work of the younger, traveling from station to station and visiting in turn so many places where conditions for "seeing" are especially in favor of the astronomer, has naturally devoted itself to the nearer bodies to the moon particularly, to Mars in a lesser degree, and to the other planets whose neighborly relation to the earth has always given them, incidentally, a marked popular interest. The Harvard Observatory in its studies of the solar system has thus developed a sphere of interest widely separated from the science of astrophysics as applied to the endless army of the stars. Yet, after all, the living spirit that breathes in this wider field of sympathy and understanding must be very largely attributed to the personality of Director Pickering himself. As a great and important research institution, in which capacity it is the only one in the world that is part of an educational center and at the same time on a par with the famous government-supported observatories of America, England, or Germany, the Harvard Observatory has profited by the whole-hearted co-operation of a remarkably efficient staff of astronomers whose individual achievements cannot, unfortunately, find space in this article. But this staff has been largely of Director Pickering's making; the big outlines of the work of the Observatory as a whole have been his outlines; the direction of the two observatories, one at Cambridge and the other at Arequipa, has been his direction, obviously impossible without. the highly specialized skill of his assistants, but equally so without the fundamental ability to find and develop them. The Cambridge institution, moreover, has often loaned its instruments for investigations not conducted under its own auspices; its director, on more than one occasion, has surprised a capitalist by seeking financial assistance for outside astronomical research that could by no stretch of the imagination add to the fame or equipment of his own observatory; and the administration of funds bequeathed to the Harvard Observatory for astronomical purposes has been often interpreted with sufficient broadness to include any sincere worker who needed financial assistance to complete an important study. To have captured photographically the first spectrum of a shooting star, the first spectrum of the aurora borealis, or the first spectrum of a flash of lightning; to have revealed definitely and conclusively certain characteristics common to our own earth and a neighboring planet; to have added thousands of new stars to our catalogue of the heavens, or to have increased by ever so little our human knowledge of a single one of these innumerable children of infinity—these are only a few of the interests of modern astronomy, and to the astronomer of pretty nearly the same importance. The making of men, both by personal influence and by adding to the world as a whole tangible examples of high living and thinking and of consistent devotion to any given form of usefulness, is not always taken into consideration in summing up an individual record. In the case of these men such separation is out of the question, for the personal equation has been, as for that matter it invariably is, a vital factor in producing successful work. Nor can the individual characteristics be separated in summing up the ideals and practical record of the institution that the one has made, as it now stands, by force of his own administrative faculty and scientific breadth of vision, and that the other has recently established even more prominently than before in the public mind by his specific investigations. GATORS BY JULIAN A. DIMOCK ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR When the boys went out the next morning, Johnson and I went too. We started twice. The first time my friend stepped on the gunwale of the skiff in getting aboard. He failed to get aboard, but he did get a ducking! He could reel off Latin scientific names by the yard, but he never could learn the difference between the cat-head and the bight of a rope, on the boat in which we were cruising along the Gulf coast of Florida. as hot as I felt, and that was not exactly cool-but then Johnson was a superlative kind of man. For an hour we tramped through a marsh, the boys leading the way and breaking a path through the tall grass. A shrill whir sounded in front. Although it was my first rattlesnake, I intuitively knew the sound. The next instant there was the bang of the gun, and that danger was over. Mine was the face to blanch that time, for I am more afraid of snakes than I am of the devil. Half an hour later I nearly jumped over the man behind me, as I suddenly discovered a discarded snakeskin under my feet. The jump came first, and the inquiry into the age of the thing afterwards. By the time that the rays of old Sol had neared the vertical, and had become correspondingly hot, we reached the pine woods. Now, there may be places hotter than Florida pine-land, even in this world, but I doubt it. Johnson wilted after the first hundred yards. He sat down and viciously swatted the mosAt first we had a scramble through a quitoes. Then he wanted to know if we mangrove swamp which lined the shore. had any idea where we were going, or The mangrove's tangled mass of roots is where we were, or how we could get above the ground, while nearly reaching back. The guides came to the rescue down to them from above are the spread- and cheerfully assured him that Bear ing, interlocking branches. Connecting Lake was less than a quarter of a mile the two are long, straight shoots called away. I knew enough of that region to aerial rootlets. These, coming from the know what kind of a quarter that was, limbs above, take root in the soil beneath, but it didn't seem necessary to enlighten serving at once to anchor the tree and my friend. We reached it two hours make nearly impassable the swamp. A later. Johnson said that he was dead, well-developed mangrove swamp is about but he wasn't that lucky, for he continued as easy to cross as a jungle of barbed- to fight the mosquitoes. wire fences, the trees being as obstructive as the wires, and the mosquitoes quite as sharp-toothed as the barbs and much more frequent. We got through without the use of any bad language. The perspiration was streaming down Johnson's face. He looked about twice On the shore of the lake we found a boat made from dry-goods boxes. This was the trail of some 'gator hunter. The sun had opened the seams until the whole thing looked like a chicken coop. The boys were boat-builders enough to be able to calk the craft, while I sup |