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E. Lester Jones, presided at the public sessions, and the opening address was made by Mr. William C. Redfield, secretary of commerce, the department of which the survey is now a bureau. At the banquet the president of the United States made one of the addresses. Others were by the secretary of the navy, the secretary of commerce, the minister from Switzerland, and the former superintendent of the survey, Dr. T. C. Mendenhall.

The address of Dr. Mendenhall and some of the other addresses give interesting reminiscences of the early work of the survey and its first three superintendents, portraits of whom are here reproduced by the courtesy of the superintendent of the survey. Ferdinand Hassler, born in Switzerland, trained in the best schools of Europe and practised in geodetic work, came to the United States in 1805, bringing with him a fine library of over 3,000 volumes and a collection of technical instruments such as had never before crossed the ocean. He was later appointed acting professor of mathematics at West Point and, through his friend and countryman, Albert Gallatin, was introduced to Jefferson, who had recommended to the Congress a survey of the coasts. Hassler demanded and received a salary equal to that of the head of the department to which the new bureau was assigned. It is said that the president objected, saying "your salary would be as large as that of my secretary of the treasury, your superior officer," and that he replied:

"Any president can make a secretary of the treasury but only God Almighty can make a Hassler."

Hassler was sent abroad in 1811 to purchase the necessary instruments and standards of measurement but was detained in England as an alien enemy. When he returned, in 1816, the Coast and Geodetic Survey was organized, and geodetic, topographic and hydrographic work was begun. Owing to lack of appropriations by Congress, work was abandoned for twelve years, when Hassler was placed in charge of work on weights and measures, and in 1832 again assumed the duties of superintendent of the survey, which he conducted with admirable skill until his death in 1843.

Hassler was succeeded as head of the survey by Alexander Dallas Bache, a great grandson of Benjamin Franklin, whose scientific aptitudes and diplomatic skill he inherited. Graduating from the West Point Military Academy, he had attained distinction as a scientific man of originality and power, and was recommended as Hassler's successor by the scientific societies and institutions of learning. His services were continued for twenty-five years until his death in 1867; they carried forward. and enlarged in important directions the work begun by Hassler.

Benjamin Peirce, the distinguished mathematician, who had conducted the longitude operations of the survey during the latter years of Bache's administration, succeeded him as superintendent, a position which he held until the age of sixty-five years, while retaining his professorship at Harvard University. The picture of Peirce shows him at the blackboard. He is said once at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences to have spent an hour filling the blackboard with equations, and then to have remarked "There is only one member of the Academy who can understand my work and he is in South America." Under Peirce a chain of triangles extending across the continent was planned covering the whole country by a trigonometrical survey and joining the systems of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

We may hope that the next three superintendents of the Coast and Geodetic Survey will be men so distinguished in science as Hassler, Bache and Peirce. If this is not the case we should surely enquire into the reason. Is it because the men do not exist, or are we less competent to manage the scientific bureaus now than was the case in the earlier part of the nineteenth century? We can not believe that the human germ plasm has changed in the