Dunsink Observatory

North-West Suburb**

Dunsink Observatory **is reached by Kingsbridge tramcar, and private car.

The **House **attached to the **Observatory **was for nearly forty years the home of **Sir William Rowan Hamilton, **who was made Superintendent of the Observatory in 1827, to the astonishment, it is said, of the astronomers of Europe.

Hamilton, not having then attained the age of twenty-two, stepped at once from the position of an undergraduate to this important post. But he was a marvel of precocious talent. He had partially acquired a knowledge of Hebrew at four years old, and the elements of Greek and Latin before he was six, and at fourteen his lingual acquirements embraced - beside Hebrew Latin and Greek - four European and five Asiatic tongues.

He was remarkable in his private life for his gentle unassuming manners, “a buoyant cheerfulness, an ingenious simplicity, a kindly human-heartedness, glad to praise, and glad to receive the reward of genuine approbation, a patient candour, a singleness of fidelity to truth, a love of all that is intellectually or morally noble.

He had little love of money, and was content to spend his days in the Observatory at Dunsink on a small salary” *(Dublin University Magazine). *He died at the Observatory House in 1855, at the age of 60. **

Edwin Wyndham Quin, Earl of Dunraven, **whose work on Irish Archaeology - the result of personal explorations of nearly every barony in Ireland, and nearly every island on the coast, accompanied by a photographer, - was published in a superb form after his death in 1871, was for three years under Sir William Hamilton here.