ACADEMY OP SCIENCES.] BIOGRAPHY. 3 



ning of 1854, .Simon Newcomb began his distinguished educational career, as the teacher of a 

 country school at Masseys Cross Roads, Kent County. The following year he secured a somewhat 

 better position as teacher of the school in the little town of Sudlersville. Newcomb valued 

 then and later a letter from the trustees of the Sudlersville school, which reads as follows: 



This is to certify that Mr. Simon Newcomb was well qualified to instruct children in the various branches of an 

 English education, and possesses a good moral character. He exhibited a very considerable knowledge of the higher 

 branches of mathematics. 



W. J. Sudler, 

 John W. E. Sudler, 

 Trustees for Primary School No. 4 o/Q. A. Co., for the year ending 1S55. 

 (Dated) Sudlersville, November 23, 1S55. 



Quoting from Newcomb's Reminiscences: "In 1854 I availed myself of my summer 

 vacation to pay my first visit to the National Capital, little dreaming that it would ever be my 

 home. I went as far as the gate of the observatory, and looked wistfully in, but feared to enter, 

 as I did not know what the rules might be regarding visitors. I speculated upon the possible 

 object of a queer red sandstone building, which seemed so different from anything else, and heard 

 for the first time of the Smithsonian Institution." 



While teaching, Newcomb passed every spare hour on such books as he could secure or gain 

 access to. He had, in the meantime, decided that mathematics was the study in which he 

 should specialize, though he did not see clearly how he could turn the results to account. 



Newcomb's first published paper is of interest from many points of view. A correspondent 

 of the newspaper, the National Intelligencer, wrote a long letter to refute the Copernican theory 

 of the universe. Newcomb has said of this letter: "It was evidently wholly fallacious, yet so 

 plausible that I feared the belief of the world in the doctrine of Copernicus might suffer a severe 

 shock, and hastened to the rescue by writing a letter over my name, pointing out the fallacies. 

 This was published in the National Intelligencer in 1855." 



In 1856 Newcomb was employed as a tutor in the family of a planter residing in Prince 

 Georges County, Md., some 15 or 20 miles from Washington. He frequently rode on horseback 

 to the Capital, which contained much to interest him. The library of the Smithsonian 

 Institution was a great attraction, and there he found Bowditch's translation of Laplace's 

 Mechanique Celeste, a great work of which he had long been dreaming. He secured Prof. 

 Joseph Henry's special permission to take the first volume home. Newcomb dipped into it 

 here and there, but found its formulae and methods quite beyond his powers at that time. 



A little later he had the pleasure of meeting Joseph Henry, who suggested that he might 

 find something to do in the Coast Survey. Newcomb established friendly relations with the 

 chief clerk of the survey, and on one occasion proposed to the clerk a plan for improving the Cav- 

 endish method of determining the density of the earth. Later he was received by Mr. J. E. 

 Hilgard, assistant in charge of the survey. An opportunity for service in the Coast Survey 

 did not present itself, but late in the year 1856 Hilgard wrote a letter to Newcomb to say 

 that he had been talking about Newcomb to Prof. Winlock, superintendent of the American 

 Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, and that it might be possible for Newcomb to obtain employ- 

 ment in the Almanac office. Newcomb had previously bought a copy of the Almanac and 

 had amused himself by computing on a slate the occultations of stars by the moon observable 

 in certain months at San Francisco. The Almanac office was then located in Cambridge, Mass., 

 and about the last day of the year 1856, armed with letters of recommendation from Prof. 

 Henry and Mr. Hilgard, Newcomb started on the tedious journey thither, in the hope that 

 employment would be offered. A few weeks later he was appointed a computer, on trial, at a 

 salary of $30 per month. Newcomb's impressions of Prof. Henry and Mr. Hilgard, and of Prof. 

 Winlock and others employed in the Almanac office, were fully up to his boyhood conception 

 of men of science, and he has written: "I date my birth into the world of sweetness and light 

 on one frosty morning in January, 1857, when I took my seat between two well-known mathe- 

 maticians (Joseph Winlock and John D. Runkle), before a blazing fire in the office of the 

 'Nautical Almanac,' at Cambridge, Massachusetts." 



