September 17, 1900] 



SCIENCE 



357 



entific career, a continual flow of medals, 

 prizes, degrees and honorary memberships 

 in scientific societies came for his recep- 

 tion, till the possibilities were exhausted. 

 His departure leaves a great gap in the 

 band of astronomers. It will be long be- 

 fore we again have one of equal untiring 

 energy. 



G. W. Hill 



SIMOy yEWCOMB 



In the death of Professor Newcomb 

 American astronomy has lost its chief or- 

 nament and American science in general 

 one of its most commanding figures. His 

 exact relation to contemporary science 

 must be determined by the judgment of 

 future times but to those who have been 

 his associates during any part of the past 

 half century his career bulks too large for 

 oblivion, too generous to be dismissed 

 without some word of appreciation. The 

 common incidents of his life, its offices and 

 honors, may here be dismissed summarily 

 since he has given in his "Reminiscences 

 of an Astronomer," an autobiography 

 that must always remain their most au- 

 thentic exposition. 



Born in Nova Scotia, of New England 

 ancestry, and returning in early man- 

 hood to the land of his fathers, there to 

 build a scientific career upon a youthful 

 experience containing scant preparation 

 for such work, he found in the Nautical 

 Almanac office, then at Cambridge, Mass., 

 a position which he himself describes as 

 his first introduction to the world of 

 sweetness and light. Appealing equally 

 to his tastes and talents this work upon the 

 almanac proved decisive of his whole 

 career in which for fifty years problems 

 of celestial mechanics constituted the core 

 about which all other activities centered. 

 Even upon his deathbed his mind was 

 fixed upon the last of the problems that 

 had been marked out as his life work and 



with its completion he sank visibly and 

 rapidly to the end. Newcomb was, how- 

 ever, far from being a man of one idea. 

 During his long professional career duty 

 and inclination alike brought him into re- 

 lation with nearly every phase of astro- 

 nomical activity, popular exposition and 

 the writing of text-books, the design and 

 use of astronomical instruments, research 

 into astronomical history and the utiliza- 

 tion of its ancient materials, the organiza- 

 tion of individual effort either for such 

 special cases as a transit of Venus and a 

 congress of science, literature and art or 

 for continuous relationship in a perma- 

 nent scientific body, such as the Astro- 

 nomical and Astrophysical Society of 

 America or the National Academy of Sci- 

 ences in both of which he was active and 

 influential. The newer fields of spectro- 

 scopic and photometric research in as- 

 tronomy into which he did not profess to 

 enter as an investigator, commanded his 

 active interest and especially in his later 

 years he was solicitous to combine their re- 

 sults with those of the older branches into 

 a consistent whole. 



But no one science, however diverse its 

 paths, seemed to Newcomb an adequate 

 field for the exercise of his powers and 

 numerous were his excursions beyond the 

 bounds of astronomy, e. g., into economic 

 theory, physics, politics, fiction and occult 

 psychic phenomena, most of which, how- 

 ever, can be expected to contribute but 

 little to his permanent fame. In the field 

 of his first choice, theoretical astronomy, 

 while his attainments were large and his 

 powers great, it may be doubted whether 

 posterity will rank his work as of the first 

 order. His greatest achievements un- 

 questionably lie in the border land be- 

 tween theory and practise where an 

 enormous body of observed data has been 

 utilized by an army of computers under 



