Modern facilities of communication have helped to impress more deeply upon modern astronomy its associative character. The electric telegraph gives a certain ubiquity which is invaluable to an observer of the skies. With the help of a wire, a battery, and a code of signals, he sees whatever is visible from any portion of our globe, depending, however, upon other eyes than his own, and so entering as a unit into a widespread organisation of intelligence. The press, again, has been a potent agent of co-operation. It has mainly contributed to unite astronomers all over the world into a body animated by the single aim of collecting "particulars" in their special branch for what Bacon termed a History of Nature, eventually to be interpreted according to the sagacious insight of some one among them gifted above his fellows. The first really effective astronomical periodical was the _Monatliche Correspondenz_, started by Von Zach in the year 1800. It was followed in 1822 by the _Astronomische Nachrichten_, later by the _Memoirs_ and _Monthly Notices_ of the Astronomical Society, and by the host of varied publications which now, in every civilised country, communicate the discoveries made in astronomy to divers classes of readers, and so incalculably quicken the current of its onward flow.
Public favour brings in its train material resources. It is represented by individual enterprise, and finds expression in an ample liberality. The first regular observatory in the Southern Hemisphere was founded at Paramatta by Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane in 1821. The Royal Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope was completed in 1829. Similar establishments were set to work by the East India Company at Madras, Bombay, and St. Helena, during the first third of the nineteenth century. The organisation of astronomy in the United States of America was due to a strong wave of popular enthusiasm. In 1825 John Quincy Adams vainly urged upon Congress the foundation of a National Observatory; but in 1843 the lectures on celestial phenomena of Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel stirred an impressionable audience to the pitch of providing him with the means of erecting at Cincinnati the first astronomical establishment worthy the name in that great country. On the 1st of January, 1882, no less than one hundred and forty-four were active within its boundaries.