490 
Proceedings of the Royal Society 
Le Verrier amongst its Honorary Members; and they cannot perhaps 
do better in the few minutes now accorded to them, than simply 
to describe something of the general character of, as well as progress 
of alteration with time in, the public career of the departed. 
The first period of Le Verrier’s virile existence may be considered to 
extend from his leaving the Polytechnic School in 1831, to receiv- 
ing the appointment of Director of the Observatory of Paris in 
1853 ; a joyous, a rising and expanding existence to him the whole 
of the time. Born in 1811 at St Lo, in the Department of Manche, 
(which courts the west wind of the Atlantic along the whole extent 
of its coast), and son of a Government official there, the young Le 
Verrier had received his education first in provincial, then in Parisian, 
schools, always manifesting a taste for, and superior power in, pure 
mathematics; but with a further determination also to hold his own 
course, and to prosecute his own excelsior ideals therein. Hence, on 
ceasing to be a college student in 1831, and beginning his career 
as a man, as the architect too of his own fortunes to be, he seems to 
have chosen, not a poorly paid, over worked, hard scientific post, 
but the more easily executed, and better paid employment of the 
ordinary civil service of his country ; selecting such a branch therein 
as should leave him most spare time for the prosecution of his pri- 
vate reading; and only when, after some years, the further continua- 
tion of that official employment, the Administration des Tabacs , 
would have obliged him to leave the neighbourhood of metropolitan 
libraries, — did he seek to support himself by teaching mathematics, 
of which he then became one of the assistant professors in his old 
Polytechnic School. 
But those pedagogic labours by day, the still youthful Le Verrier 
never allowed to interfere with his own private studies at night. 
He had already comprehended and fervently accepted his destiny ; 
viz., to succeed La Place in those applications of the higher mathe- 
matical analysis to celestial mechanics, which demand as much of 
continued labour, and power of abstraction, as of penetration, 
genius, and analytical resources. Hence his earliest paper presented 
to the Academy of Sciences in 1839, attacked no less than the secular 
inequalities in the movements of the principal planets. His second 
paper took up the orbit of Mercury, and the most exact calculation 
