ACADEMY Or SCIENCES] BIOGRAPHY. 7 



lack of definite published results is exceedingly unfortunate. In another sense, their non- 

 appearance may not be a serious matter, inasmuch as the transit of Venus method of deter- 

 mining the quantity sought has been superseded by incomparably better methods. 



Prof. Newcomb rendered exceedingly valuable service in connection with several of the 

 world's great telescopes. His relations to the Lick Observatory were particularly interesting. 

 Shortly after James Lick had provided for the construction of a telescope " superior to and more 

 powerful than any telescope ever yet made," the president of Mr. Lick's first board of trustees, 

 Mr. D. O. Mills, visited Washington (in the summer of 1874) to confer with the Government 

 astronomers, and chiefly with Prof. Newcomb, as to the kind and size of telescope which the 

 trustees should endeavor to secure. At Mr. Mills's request Newcomb visited the leading Euro- 

 pean telescope makers, in order to determine whether it was advisable to look beyond the firm 

 of Alvan Clark & Sons in seeking to make a contract. His report to the trustees, bearing the 

 date March 4, 1875, discouraged the trustees from further consideration of European opticians. 

 It was on the occasion of Mr. Mills's first visit to Washington that Prof. Newcomb recom- 

 mended strongly the advisability of selecting a director for the Lick Observatory, and sug- 

 gested that Prof. Holden, then Newcomb's assistant on the 26-inch equatorial, might be well 

 qualified. In 1876 Capt. Floyd, the president of Lick's third board of trustees, which finally 

 built the observatory, consulted in Washington with Prof. Newcomb, and it was at the sug- 

 gestion of Profs. Newcomb and Holden that Mr. Burnham went to Mount Hamilton in 1879 as 

 an expert to test the atmospheric conditions prevailing there. However, this was after Mr. 

 Lick had definitely selected Mount Hamilton as the site of his observatory, and after the county 

 authorities had completed a splendid road to the summit on that condition. It was too late to 

 change the location, but fortunately Burnham's report was enthusiastically favorable. 



At Capt. Floyd's request, Profs. Newcomb and Holden suggested plans for the positions 

 and the principal features of the main buildings of the Lick Observatory, and these plans were 

 followed in a general way. Newcomb and Floyd inspected the mounting for the 36-inch Lick 

 refractor in the shops of the builders, Warner & Swasey, Cleveland, Ohio, in 1887. Newcomb 

 continued to take a lively interest in the Lick Observatory and its work to the end of Ins life. 



It is not impossible that the successful construction of the 26-inch Washington telescope 

 was responsible for James Lick's idea and decision to provide for the construction of a larger 

 telescope. Extensive descriptions of the Washington instrument were published in the leading 

 American newspapers at the time of its completion, and an associate of James Lick has told me 

 that he saw scattered about Lick's living room the copies of a large number of American news- 

 papers which contained these descriptions. 



When Otto Struve, director of the great Russian observatory at Poulkovo, informed Prof. 

 Newcomb in 1S78 that he was arranging with his Government for a grant of money to construct 

 a great refracting telescope, Newcomb called his attention to the ability and success of Alvan 

 Clark & Sons in making large object glasses. Struve's efforts to obtain a suitable object glass 

 from European opticians were fruitless, and he came to the United States in 1879 to make a con- 

 tract with the Clarks. Prof. Newcomb, as a friend of both parties, took a prominent part in 

 the negotiations. It was chiefly in appreciation of these services that the Czar of Russia, in 

 1889, presented to Prof. Newcomb a rare vase of jaspar bearing the inscription: "A Monsieur 

 le Professeur Simon Newcomb de la part de l'Observatoire Central Nicolas de Poulkovo 7/19 

 Aout, 1S89." 



The lunar investigations and tables by Hansen, to which we have referred, published by 

 the British Government in 1857, were based on a few of the Greenwich observations of the moon 

 made between 1750 and 1850. Observations prior to 1750, so far as they seemed to be avail- 

 able, were thought to be too inexact for the purpose. Newcomb considered it very probable 

 that many unpublished observations of occult ations of bright stars by the moon prior to 1750 

 were recorded in astronomers' notebooks on file in the European observatories. 



A few occultations, published in the Memoirs of the French Academy and in the Philo- 

 sophical Transactions, made between the years 1660 and 1700, showed that Hansen's tables, 

 carried back to that period, were much in error, and the importance of making a search for 



