Best and most widely known as an astronomer, his achievements in that science were not suited for sensational exploitation.  He discovered no apple-orchards on the moon, neither did he dispute regarding the railways on the planet Venus.  His aim was to make still more exact our knowledge of the motions of the bodies constituting what we call the solar system, and his labors toward this end, begun more than thirty years ago, he continued almost until the day of his death.  Conscious that his span of life was measured by months and in the grip of what he knew to be a fatal disease, he yet exerted himself with all his remaining energy to complete his monumental work on the motion of the moon, and succeeded in bringing it to an end before the final summons came.  His last days thus had in them a cast of the heroic, not less than if, as the commander of a torpedoed battleship, he had gone down with her, or than if he had fallen charging at the head of a forlorn hope.  It is pleasant to think that such a man was laid to rest with military honors.  The accident that he was a retired professor in the United States Navy may have been the immediate cause of this, but its appropriateness lies deeper.

Newcomb saw the light not under the Stars and Stripes, but in Nova Scotia, where he was born, at the town of Wallace on March 12, 1835.  His father, a teacher, was of American descent, his ancestors having settled in Canada in 1761.  After studying with his father and teaching for some little time in his native province he came to the United States while yet a boy of eighteen, and while teaching in Maryland in 1854-’56 was so fortunate as to attract, by his mathematical ability, the attention of two eminent American scientific men, Joseph Henry and Julius Hilgard, who secured him an appointment as computer on the Nautical Almanac.  The date of this was 1857, and Newcomb had thus, at his death, been in Government employ for fifty-two years.  As the work of the almanac was then carried on in Cambridge, Mass., he was enabled to enter the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University, where he graduated in 1858 and where he pursued graduate studies for three years longer.  On their completion in 1861 he was appointed a professor of mathematics in the United States Navy, which office he held till his death.  This appointment, made when he was twenty-six years old,—­scarcely more than a boy,—­is a striking testimony to his remarkable ability as a mathematician, for of practical astronomy he still knew little.

One of his first duties at Washington was to supervise the construction of the great 26-inch equatorial just authorized by Congress and to plan for mounting and housing it.  In 1877 he became senior professor of mathematics in the navy, and from that time until his retirement as a Rear Admiral in 1897 he had charge of the Nautical Almanac office, with its large corps of naval and civilian assistants, in Washington and elsewhere.  In 1884 he also assumed the chair of mathematics and astronomy in Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and he had much to to do, in an advisory capacity, with the equipment of the Lick Observatory and with testing and mounting its great telescope, at that time the largest in the world.