myself compelled to reply that I believed them to be subject to a constant error about a hundred times greater than that which have been deemed probable, owing to the elastic swaying of the brass tripod with the pendulum. The idea being novel to my auditors, little was said at the time; for men of science like them do not declaim without exact observation to support their opinions. But the next year, at a meeting in Brussels, three of the leading men described experiments they had made which had convinced them that "our American confrére"

had — well, had found a mare's nest. I received the report of these utterances just as a third meeting of the body, the Europäische Gradmessung or association of the governmental surveys of the continent in Europe, was about to be held in Stuttgart, and

at once applied to my superior officer, the Superintendent of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, for leave to be present at that meeting and there defend what had before been little more that a well —grounded opinion but which further mathematical analysis and measurements had converted into certain knowledge. But the Superintendent was so over-awed by the great authority of those who had declared against my thesis, that I should not have been able to appear at the meeting if I had not resorted to a ruse, by which I got a paragraph inserted in the editorial page of that New York daily that was most influential in Washington, strongly urging that some Coast Survey officer be dispatched to the meeting. The next day I received no permission, but telegraphic orders to be present there; and after I had detailed my analysis and my experiments and exhibited my records, my

three former opponents, one after another, rose and fully acknowledged that I was in the right; for they were Men of Science, and their desire was for the truth and not personal glory.