It is a bit odd that as I come to write of him, this small witticism of half a century back should thrust itself obstinately into my memory, but after all it may not be out of place.  The impression of the greatness of a mountain we get powerfully if the eye can measure it from the waif of seaweed at low tide up to the snow-cap of the summit.  At this and similar jokes the boy Simon Newcomb connived, as he moved in our crowd.  They were the waifs at low tide from which his towering mind rose to the measuring of the courses of the stars.  He came among us as a student of the Lawrence scientific school, muscular and heavy-shouldered from work on shore and at the oar in Nova Scotia.  Though not slovenly, he was the reverse of trim.  His rather outlandish clothes, pressed once for all when they left the shop of the provincial tailor, held his sturdy elbows and knees in bags moulded accurately to the capacious joints.  His hair hung rebelliously, and his nascent beard showed an untrained hand at the razor.  But his brow was broad, his eye clear and intelligent, and he was a man to be reckoned with.  He was barely of age, but already a computer in the Nautical Almanac office, then located at Cambridge, and we well knew work of that sort required brains of the best.  Since Simon Newcomb’s death an interesting story has been told about his heredity.  His strong-brained father, measuring his own qualities with rigid introspection, discovering where he was weak and where capable resolved that whatever wife he chose should supplement in her personality the points to which he lacked.  He would father sons and daughters who should come into the world well appointed; in particular he looked toward offspring who should possess high scientific gifts.  With this mind he set out on his courting, and steering clear of vain entanglements with rather preternatural coolness, at last in a remote village, satisfied himself that he had found his complement.  He permitted his docile heart to fall in love, and in due course there was born into the world a great man.  The wooing has a humorous aspect,—­this steering of unruly Hymen!  The calculated result, however, did not fail of appearance, and perhaps the world might profit from such an example.  I was strongly drawn toward Simon Newcomb by his unlikeness to myself.  I was town-bred and he full of strength gained in the fields and along the beach.  My own disinclination for mathematics was marked, but I had a vast admiration for a man to whom its processes were easy.  We became very good friends.  He was a genial fellow, capable as I have said of taking or making a joke, yet his moods were prevailingly serious, and he had already hitched his waggon to a star.  Abnormally purposeful perhaps, a cropping out no doubt of heredity, he had set a high mark for himself and was already striving toward it.  In an autobiographical fragment he says, referring to his early surrender of his powers to high mathematical work: