The Octagon at Amherst College, built in 1847–48 under president Edward Hitchcock and constructed by Henry A. Sykes, began as the campus’s first natural history museum and observatory. Its unusual design joined a domed observatory with displays of scientific specimens, including meteorites, animals, and fossils, reflecting a nineteenth-century view of natural history that embraced both earth and sky. As the first building of its kind on campus, it showed an early institutional commitment to scientific teaching and observation. Its importance rests in its dual purpose and in the close connection it expressed between science, education, and religious thought at the college.