SKETCH OF JOHN COUCH ADAMS. 545 



SKETCH OF JOHN COUCH ADAMS. 



ONE of the most striking illustrations of the value and range 

 of man's reasoning faculty is afforded by the substantially 

 simultaneous calculation, on a purely mathematical basis, of the 

 elements of the then unseen and unknown planet Neptune, and 

 the prediction of the place in the sky where it would be found 

 on a given day, by the Englishman Adams and the Frenchman 

 Leverrier. While Leverrier succeeded in first attracting public 

 attention to his work, Adams anticipated him in beginning the 

 calculation and in bringing it to a satisfactory result. 



Prof. J. W. S. Glaisher treats Adams's first paper, by means of 

 which the new planet might have been discovered, as furnishing 

 the final and inexorable proof of Newton's law of gravitation; 

 and the day when it was taken to Greenwich October '21, 1845 

 as therefore marking a distinct epoch in the history of gravita- 

 tional astronomy. 



John Couch Adams was born at Lancast, seven miles west of 

 Launceston, Cornwall, England, June 5, 1819, and died at the 

 observatory in Cambridge, January 21, 1892. His father was a 

 tenant farmer ; his mother had a small landed estate of her own, 

 and had inherited her uncle's library, in which were a few books 

 on astronomy. He was interested in these books, and made rapid 

 progress at the village school, and was learning algebra before he 

 was twelve years old, at which age he went to a private school at 

 Devonport, where he had Mr. Grylls, a cousin of his mother's, as 

 his teacher. While he studied, as usual, the classics and mathe- 

 matics, astronomy was his favorite branch, and he was mak- 

 ing notes and drawing maps of the constellations when fourteen 

 years old ; he read eagerly all the astronomical books he could 

 find, and soon became interested, by the perusal of Vince's Flux- 

 ions, in the higher mathematics. In 1837 it was contemplated to 

 send him to the University of Cambridge ; in October, 1839, he 

 entered St. John's College of that university. During his under- 

 graduate career, according to Prof. J. W. L. Glaisher, he was inva- 

 riably the first man of his year in the college examinations. In 

 1843 he was graduated as senior wrangler, being also first Smith's 

 prize-man. The occurrence of a small constellation of mathemat- 

 ical senior wranglers at Cambridge about this time is noted in 

 one of the biographies of Adams, viz. : Stokes in 1841, Cayley in 

 1842, and Adams in 1843 all three of whom have since been pro- 

 fessors, and famous. Adams was elected a Fellow of his college 

 on the year of his graduation, and continued in that relation till 

 1852, when, he not having taken holy orders, his fellowship ex- 



TOL. XLI. 40 



