OBITUARY NOTICES. 
John Couch Adams. By Professor Copeland. 
(Read March 6, 1893.) 
At Lidcot farm, in the rural parish of Laneast, some seven miles to 
the west of Launceston, in Cornwall, on June 5th, 1819, was born 
John Couch Adams, whose name will ever be inseparably associated 
with the discovery of Neptune. Educated at Devonport, he entered 
St John’s College, Cambridge, in October 1839. He graduated as 
Senior Wrangler and first Smith’s Prizeman early in 1843, and 
shortly afterwards was elected a Fellow of his college, and became 
one of its mathematical tutors. As a student, he had read in Airy’s 
Report on the Progress of Astronomy during the Present Century 
about cei'tain unexplained perturbations of Uranus, as shown by 
Bouvard’s tables of that planet, and at once perceived that they 
probably arose from the action of an unknown member of the solar 
system. Seeing, however, that no merely superficial research could 
throw light on the subject, he, for the time, contented himself with 
jotting down on Saturday, July 3rd, 1841, the following memoran- 
dum ; — “Formed a design, in the beginning of this week, of inves- 
tigating, as soon as possible after taking my degree, the irregularities 
in the motion of Uranus which are yet unaccounted for ; in order to 
find whether they may be attributed to the action of an undiscovered 
planet beyond it, and, if possible, thence to determine approximately 
the elements of its orbit, &c., which would probably lead to its 
discovery.” 
The investigation must indeed have been taken up immediately 
after his graduation, for already, in 1843, by combining the modern 
observations with the residuals of Bouvard’s equations, on the assump- 
tion of a circular orbit for the unknown planet, a first solution was 
