Annual Report of the Council. xxxiii 



of the Seewarte he was indefatigable in his labours to introduce 

 the best scientific methods into all work performed in the 

 German naval and mercantile services, and to-day, thanks to his 

 guidance, both may be said to be second to none in the 

 accuracy and trustworthiness of their contributions to scientific 

 progress. W. M. T. 



Simon Newcomb was born at Wallace, Nova Scotia, March 

 1 2th, 1835, his father being John Burton Newcomb, a country 

 school teacher. Young Newcomb was privately educated by his 

 father, and when about 18 years of age commenced to teach in 

 schools himself. Some four years later he received an appoint- 

 ment on the U.S. Nautical Almanac at Cambridge, Mass., and 

 at the same time attended the Lawrence Scientific School, 

 graduating B.Sc. at Harvard in 1S58. In 1861 he was appointed 

 Professor in the U.S. Navy, and Astronomer at the Naval 

 Observatory in Washington. Two years later he married Mary 

 Caroline Hassler (daughter of Dr. Charles A. Hassler, of the 

 U.S. Navy) who, with his three daughters, survives him. 



Newcomb remained in the Navy till 1877, when he was 

 appointed Director of the U.S. Nautical Almanac, retiring from 

 that post, in accordance with the regulations, in 1897, at the age 

 of 62. During his Directorship of the Nautical Almanac in 

 1884 he accepted the Chair of Mathematics and Astronomy in 

 the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, retaining it until 1895. 

 After his retirement from office he continued to live and follow 

 his bent (which included not only IMathematics and Astronomy 

 but Political Economy and Psychology) at Washington. He 

 died on July nth, 1909. 



His first publication was an answer to a " crank " theorist 

 on the Copernican doctrine. In i860 he published his first 

 elaborate work, " Secular Variations and Mutual Relations of 

 the Orbits of the Asteroids." In this work he applied to the 

 asteroids the theory of perturbations with a view to proving or 

 disproving Olber's explosion theory ; but although carried back 



