or of the Washburn Observatory; and obtaining, at the request of Governor Washburn, a leave of absence from the Naval Observatory, February 2, 1881, he immediately proceeded to Madison to take charge of the observatory, which was then in an entirely unfinished state: his official connection with the navy was not severed till June 1, 1882. Professor Holden's five years of administration of the Washburn Observatory have established it in the foremost rank of American observatories. Four volumes of publications have been issued, the last one containing the most important piece of work of the Repsold meridian circle, the determination of the positions of the 303 fundamental stars for the southern zones of the "Astronomische Gesellschaft"; to form, however, an adequate idea of the varied labors of the director and his assistants, reference must be made to the volumes themselves. In 1883 Professor Holden's work at Madison was interrupted for several months, to conduct the Government expedition to Caroline Island in the South Pacific mid-ocean, for the purpose of observing the total eclipse of the sun on May 6th. Professor Holden's chosen task was again, as in 1878, the search for intra-Mercurial planets, and with the exceptionally long duration of totality—nearly six minutes—this search was made under most favorable circumstances, and again resulted negatively. The account of this expedition, contained in an interesting memoir of the National Academy of Sciences, will be found to be "much more than a technical report on the dry scientific details of the work of eclipse-observers": it includes an entertaining narrative of the ocean-voyage of twenty-nine days from Callao, and a complete history and description of the lonely little island, with photographic views of the characteristic vegetation and reef-beeches.
Professor Holden's resignation of the chair of Astronomy at Madison took effect on the 1st of January, 1886, upon his acceptance of his present position, the presidency of the University of California, and directorship of the Lick Observatory. Since 1874 he has been one of the chief consulting astronomers to the Lick trustees, who, under the provisions of the will, have charge of building and equipping the observatory. In 1881 he visited Mount Hamilton and successfully observed the transit of Mercury; in 1833 he visited it again, and in 1884 he went out again to superintend the erection of the fine Repsold meridian circle. The Lick Observatory, as it approaches completion, has received so much attention in scientific and popular journals, that a description of it seems hardly necessary here. The giant thirty-six-inch objective—through which "the observer might expect to see the moon much the same as he would without the telescope if it were only a hundred miles away," and might make out objects on the moon's surface "although they were no larger than some of the larger edifices on the earth"—is now in a fair way to be finished by the Clarks during the autumn of the present year; the steel dome will probably be finished about the
