It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. In many ways, this is a golden age in cosmology. Large new telescopes and efficient detectors have enabled surveys of unprecedented depth and scope. There are nearly a hundred thousand published galaxy redshifts; soon there will be several million. Quasars and other AGN are being successfully used to measure diffuse baryons (via absorption lines) and the distribution of dark matter (via gravitational lensing) over 90% of the lookback time. There is good evidence that our universe is adequately described by the hot big bang model - with understandable uncertainty over the first billion years or so when gravitational collapse was nonlinear and many stellar systems formed (e.g. Peebles 1993). Supercomputer models successfully reproduce the observed basic characteristics of large scale structure.
On the other hand, we remain ignorant of important aspects of cosmology (for an overview, see Bahcall and Ostriker 1997). The need for dark matter is inescapable, but the most viable candidates for a cold dark matter particle involve new or unknown physics. We believe that gravity can explain the large scale motions and clustering of galaxies, but neither supercomputer simulations nor pure theory can account for all of the existing observations. The quest to measure the parameters of the standard model continues. This was the goal of the Palomar 200 inch telescope when it was built in the 1930s, it was a goal of the Hubble Space Telescope when it was launched nearly ten years ago, and it is a goal of current and prospective 8-10 meter telescopes and microwave satellites. Only those who fall prey to the ancient Greek sin of hubris would claim that the end of cosmology is in sight. Astronomy is an observational science, and the universe has shown an impressive ability to surprise us.