ACADEMY OW SCIENCES.] BIOGRAPHY. 17 



Many items of services rendered or honors received, additional to or in amplification of 

 foregoing references, should be mentioned. 



Newcomb was a member of the National Academy committee to arrange the program of 

 observations for the total solar eclipse of May, 1883. He was one of the academy's three dele- 

 gates to the Wiesbaden Conference of 1S99 which led to the organization of the International 

 Association of Academies. He was the academy's delegate to the meeting of the Council of 

 the International Association of Academies held in London in 1903. He was a member of the 

 academy committee on weights, measures, and coinage. He was a member of the academy 

 committee which the Government authorities had requested to consider a report "upon the 

 surveys of a scientific character made under the auspices of the War and Interior Departments 

 and the Land Office." He was chairman of the academy advisory committee on meteorology, 

 appointed in 1881. He was a member of the academy committee, appointed in 1886, to con- 

 sider and report on the work of the scientific bureaus of the Government, with the view of 

 securing greater efficiency and economy of administration. He was a member of the academy 

 committee, in 1884, to assist the customs department in arriving at the correct interpretation 

 of the expression, " philosophical and scientific apparatus, instruments, and preparations." 



Newcomb was one of the three members of the National Academy named in the will of 

 Prof. J. C. Watson to administer, with the academy's approval, the income of the Watson 

 Fund, in which service he was active from 1881 until his death. He was chairman of the 

 board of trustees of the Watson Fund from 1887 to 1909. In this interval the Watson Fund 

 supported various minor researches and financed the laborious anil highly skilled investigations 

 on the motions of the Watson asteroids made by Prof. Leuschner; and the Watson gold medal 

 of the academy was awarded to B. A. Gould (1S87), Edward Schonfeld (18S9), Arthur Auwers 

 (1891), S. C. Chandler (1894), and Sir David Gill (1899). 8 This list of medalists is conspicuous 

 by the absence of Newcomb's name; a regrettable omission, presumably due to the fact that 

 he was chairman of the board of trustees, which governed the making of the awards. 



Newcomb was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in 

 1S77. He was the first president of the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America 

 (now the American Astronomical Society), founded in 1899, and was reelected president annu- 

 ally until 1905, when he requested and insisted on relief from the duty. He was president of 

 the International Congress of Arts and Science at the Universal Exposition, held at St. Louis in 

 1904, where he delivered the introductory address, at the opening session, on The Evolution of 

 the Scientific Investigator. His influence was potent in the selection of the great number of 

 speakers from this and other countries who were invited to address the St. Louis congress, and 

 he made a special trip to Europe in 1893 to secure the cooperation of the leading European 

 men of science. He was elected a member of the board of overseers of Harvard University for 

 the period 1906-1912. His portrait was painted in 1887, in compliance with the request of the 

 Czar of Russia, for placing in the gallery of famous astronomers, in the Poulkovo Observatory. 

 The University of Tokyo, in 1888, presented him with a pair of bronze vases of great beauty and 

 value. He was elected one of the eight foreign associates of the Paris Academy of Sciences in 

 1895, to succeed von Helmholtz, Benjamin Franklin having been the only other native American 

 to hold this appointment. He was a member of the first advisory committee on astronomy in the 

 Carnegie Institution, in 1902-3, and thereafter a research associate in the institution. Grants of 

 money in support of his researches on the moon were made each year by the institution. New- 

 comb was the first to receive the Bruce gold medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, in 

 1S97. The rules of award make this medal international in character; the directors of six 

 observatories, Berlin,* Greenwich, Harvard, Lick, Paris, and Yerkes, nominate a limited number 

 of astronomers worthy to receive the medal, and the directors of the society must select the 

 nominee from this list. The president of the society, in awarding the first medal, said, "One 

 name stood forward so prominently in the nominations from the heads of six leading observa- 

 tories of the world that the directors of this society could but set the seal of their approval upon 

 the verdict of his peers and award the first Bruce medal to Prof. Simon Newcomb." 



9 Note added in 1917: The sixth award of the Watson medal was made in 1917, to A. O. Leuschner. 

 •Cordoba was substituted for Berlin in 1919. 



