Simon 1835-1909 Newcomb

As early as 1860 Newcomb communicated an important memoir to the American Academy, On the Secular Variations and Mutual Relation of the Orbits of the Asteroids, in which he discussed the two principal hypotheses to account for the origin of these bodies—one, that they are the shattered fragments of a single planet (Olbers's hypothesis), the other, that they have been formed by the breaking up of a revolving ring of nebulous matter.

In the

Astronomical Papers of the American Ephemeris will be found a large number of contributions from Newcomb's pen on some fundamental and most important questions of astronomy. Among these are papers on The Recurrence of Solar Eclipses, A Transformation of Hansen's Lunar Theory, Development of the Perturbative Function and its Derivatives. His memoir On the Motion of Hyperion, a New Case in Celestial Mechanics, is in some respects one of his most original researches. He discussed the transits of Venus of 1761 and 1769, and those of Mercury from 1677 to 1881. At the international conference, which met at Paris in 1896 for the purpose of elaborating a common system of constants and fundamental stars to be employed in the va rious national ephemerides, Newcomb took a leading part, and at its suggestion undertook the task of determining a definite value of the constant of precession, and of compiling a new catalogue of standard stars. The results of these investigations were published in 1899, and were in general use for a quarter of a century. In the intervals of these immense labours, on which his reputation as an astronomer rests, he found leisure for works of a lighter character; e.g., his Popular Astronomy (1878), his

Astronomy for Schools and Colleges (1880), written in conjunc tion with E. S. Holden, and Astronomy for Everybody (1903). After his retirement from official life he published an excellent popular treatise on The Stars (1901). Several of these books have been translated into one or more of seven different foreign lan guages. A more recondite work is his Compendium of Spherical Astronomy (1906). He also wrote on questions of finance and economics, as well as in the field of fiction.

He received honorary degrees from ten European and seven American universities. He was a member of 45 foreign societies. He was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1874, the Huyghens gold medal of the Holland Society of Science in 1878, the Copley medal of the Royal Society in 1890, the Bruce gold medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1897, the Schubert prize of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, in 1897, and the Sylvester prize of Johns Hopkins university in 1901. He died at Washington on July 11, 1909, and was given a military funeral befitting his rank as a rear admiral in the United States Navy.

An autobiography, Reminiscences of an Astronomer, appeared in 1903 and a bibliography of his life and works containing 541 titles, is given by R. C. Archibald in Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, xvii., "First Memoir," pp. 19-69. This also contains, pp. 1-18, "Biographical Memoir" by W. W.

Campbell. (W. S. E.)