happily they had left the building just before the accident occurred. As
good luck would have it, the great telescope was also uninjured, but a
great deal of damage was done to the building.

It is estimated that it will take the whole summer to tear out the
wreckage and make the repairs.

During that time the telescope cannot be used. This is a great
disappointment to the scientists.

We told you of the labor entailed in the grinding of a lens.

Mr. Alvan G. Clark, the man who made the great glass of which we have
been speaking, has just died.

He and his father and brother had devoted their entire lives to the
making of telescopes, and made many of the famous glasses of the world.
The great glass at the Lick Observatory, which measures thirty-six
inches across, is of their manufacture.

Their greatest triumph was the Yerkes lens, which is forty inches in
diameter, and which was completed only a few months before Mr. Clark's
death.

This firm did a great deal to further astronomical research. Not only
did they manufacture such perfect instruments that the possibilities of
observing the stars were greatly increased, but they were close students
of the science themselves. Mr. Alvan G. Clark, in particular, made
several important discoveries, having found no less than fourteen new
stars.