SIMON NEWCOMB. 

 By W. W. Campbell. 



Simon Newcomb's * ancestry was chiefly English, and in minor degrees Scotch, French, 

 German, and Irish. His first paternal ancestors to cross the ocean were the family de Vigne. 

 A son of theirs was the first boy of European stock born on Manhattan Island. Simon New- 

 comb's mother was a descendant of Elder William Brewster and his son Jonathan, who came 

 with the Mayflower company, and of Elder Prince, of Hull, and others who came later. New- 

 comb's ancestors in every line had crossed the Atlantic long before the American Eevolution, 

 and the American descent was almost entirely through New England families. The first identi- 

 fied Newcomb was a sea captain, who married in Boston in 1663. The first Simon Newcomb 

 was born in Massachusetts or Maine about 1666. His descendants formed the habit of naming 

 their eldest sons after him, and except for the fact that his father was a younger son, the 

 astronomer would have been the sixth Simon Newcomb in unbroken lineal descent. His 

 paternal grandfather, Simon Newcomb, who removed to Nova Scotia in 1761, was a stonecutter, 

 but he was credited "with unusual learning and with having at some time taught school;" and 

 he possessed a small collection of books on serious subjects — an algebra, a Euclid, a navigator, 

 The Spectator, etc. — which were destined to influence profoundly the life of our colleague. 



The astronomer's father, John Burton Newcomb, was by profession a country school- 

 teacher. He was a strong character in some ways, and he had the distinction of being an early 

 exponent of the principles of eugenics. After careful study he concluded that a man should 

 marry at the age of 25, and that the wife should have certain temperamental characteristics 

 and be mentally gifted. When John Newcomb "found the age of 25 approaching he began to 

 look about. There was no one in (his village of) Wallace who satisfied the requirements. He 

 therefore set out afoot to discover his ideal." His searches were in vain until they had extended 

 nearly a hundred miles from home and into the neighboring Province of New Brunswick. Hear- 

 ing the strains of music from a church he went in, and there found his future wife, Emily Prince, 

 in the person of the organist and leader of the singing. Emily's father had migrated from 

 Maine to New Brunswick early in life, where he became a widely known and highly respected 

 citizen of the Province. John Newcomb always "expressed the highest admiration for Emily 

 Newcomb's mental gifts, to which he attributed whatever talents his children might have 

 possessed." 



Simon Newcomb, the astronomer, was born on March 12, 1835, at Wallace, on the north 

 coast of Nova Scotia. As the teaching profession in those days was an almost nomadic one, 

 the movings of the family were frequent, and Simon's childhood and boyhood were lived in 

 various parts of Nova Scotia and in Prince Edward Island. Simon was well endowed by 

 nature; he was strong of body, mind, and character. "What we now call school training, the 

 pursuit of fixed studies at stated hours under the constant guidance of a teacher, I (Simon) 

 could scarcely be said to have enjoyed. For the most part, when I attended my father's school 

 at all, I came and went with entire freedom * * * ." Simon was precocious, and he 

 appears to have been born with the conquering power of concentration of mind. Arithmetic 

 was begun at the age of 5, and the study of geography at 6; and at 6§ years of age he was 

 "pretty well through the arithmetic," not including cube root. While his age was still expressed 

 in one digit, his father secured for him an old work on astronomy, concerning which the father 

 late in life wrote to the son: "You were wonderfully taken with it, and read it with avidity. 

 * * * I one evening lectured on astronomy at home; the house was pretty well filled. * * * 



i Many items in this biography have been taken from Newcomb's autobiographical volume, The Reminiscences o! an Astronomer; Houghton, 

 Mifflin & Co., 1903. 



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