The Uses of Astronomy | Page 9

wafts him up between Schodac and Castleton; and here he landed and passed a day with the natives,--greeted with all sorts of barbarous hospitality,--the land "the finest for cultivation he ever set foot on," the natives so kind and gentle, that when they found he would not remain with them over night, and feared that he left them--poor children of nature!--because he was afraid of their weapons,--he, whose quarter-deck was heavy with ordnance,--they "broke their arrows in pieces, and threw them in the fire." On the following morning, with the early flood-tide, on the 19th of September, 1609, the Half Moon "ran higher up, two leagues above the Shoals," and came to anchor in deep water, near the site of the present city of Albany. Happy if he could have closed his gallant career on the banks of the stream which so justly bears his name, and thus have escaped the sorrowful and mysterious catastrophe which awaited him the next year!
CHAMPLAIN'S VOYAGE AND THE GROWTH OF COLONIES.
But the discovery of your great river and of the site of your ancient city, is not the only event which renders the year 1609 memorable in the annals of America and the world. It was one of those years in which a sort of sympathetic movement toward great results unconsciously pervades the races and the minds of men. While Hudson discovered this mighty river and this vast region for the Dutch East India Company, Champlain, in the same year, carried the lilies of France to the beautiful lake which bears his name on your northern limits; the languishing establishments of England in Virginia were strengthened by the second charter granted to that colony; the little church of Robinson removed from Amsterdam to Leyden, from which, in a few years, they went forth, to lay the foundations of New England on Plymouth Rock; the seven United Provinces of the Netherlands, after that terrific struggle of forty years (the commencement of which has just been embalmed in a record worthy of the great event by an American historian) wrested from Spain the virtual acknowledgment of their independence, in the Twelve Years' Truce; and James the First, in the same year, granted to the British East India Company their first permanent charter,--corner-stone of an empire destined in two centuries to overshadow the East.
GALILEO'S DISCOVERIES
One more incident is wanting to complete the list of the memorable occurrences which signalize the year 1609, and one most worthy to be remembered by us on this occasion. Cotemporaneously with the events which I have enumerated--eras of history, dates of empire, the starting-point in some of the greatest political, social, and moral revolutions in our annals, an Italian astronomer, who had heard of the magnifying glasses which had been made in Holland, by which distant objects could be brought seemingly near, caught at the idea, constructed a telescope, and pointed it to the heavens. Yes, my friends, in the same year in which Hudson discovered your river and the site of your ancient town, in which Robinson made his melancholy hegira from Amsterdam to Leyden, Galileo Galilei, with a telescope, the work of his own hands, discovered the phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter; and now, after the lapse of less than two centuries and a half, on a spot then embosomed in the wilderness--the covert of the least civilized of all the races of men--we are assembled--descendants of the Hollanders, descendants of the Pilgrims, in this ancient and prosperous city, to inaugurate the establishment of a first-class Astronomical Observatory.
EARLY DAYS OF ALBANY.
One more glance at your early history. Three years after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Fort Orange was erected, in the center of what is now the business part of the city of Albany; and, a few years later, the little hamlet of Beverswyck began to nestle under its walls. Two centuries ago, my Albanian friends, this very year, and I believe this very month of August, your forefathers assembled, not to inaugurate an observatory, but to lay the foundations of a new church, in the place of the rude cabin which had hitherto served them in that capacity. It was built at the intersection of Yonker's and Handelaar's, better known to you as State and Market streets. Public and private liberality co?perated in the important work. The authorities at the Fort gave fifteen hundred guilders; the patroon of that early day, with the liberality co?val with the name and the race, contributed a thousand; while the inhabitants, for whose benefit it was erected, whose numbers were small and their resources smaller, contributed twenty beavers "for the purchase of an oaken pulpit in Holland." Whether the largest part of this subscription was bestowed by some liberal benefactress, tradition has not informed us.
NEW AMSTERDAM
Nor is the