"Solving the Riddle of the Universe" should be the title of the work that has been going on for the past thirty years in the University Observatory. Night after night and year after year, without ostentation or public applause, the astronomers have been combing the heavens, searching among the millions of other worlds, their sole purpose being to add to the sum of human knowledge. Of all the new stars discovered since 1886, Harvard has the honor of claiming seventy per cent as her own.

To the ordinary man, intent upon his own affairs, and content to let the universe whirl on as it it will so long as it does not bother him, the fact that men devote their whole lives to the stars is of little moment. He feels that it is a great waste of time, perhaps--that is all. Unknown to him is the fact that he sets his watch according to time given him by astronomers, that ships could not navigate the seas; that the commerce of the world depends on the painstaking care and self-sacrificing effort of men whose names are and over will be unknown to fame.

The University is proud of its Astronomical Observatory, and proud of those who have devoted themselves to the exacting, ill-paid work of searching the dark reaches of the infinite for knowledge which the world will sooner or later turn to account, and for which it will be supremely though mutely, grateful.