Newcomb’s appointment as head of the Nautical Almanac office greatly facilitated his work on the various phases of this problem of planetary motions.  Their solution was here a legitimate part of the routine work of the office, and he had the aid of able assistants,—­such men as G.W.  Hill, who worked out a large part of the theory of Jupiter and Saturn, and Cleveland Keith, who died in 1896, just as the final results of his work were being combined.  In connection with this work Professor Newcomb strongly advocated the unification of the world’s time by the adoption of an international meridian, and also international agreement upon a uniform system of data for all computations relating to the fixed stars.  The former still hangs fire, owing to mistaken “patriotism”; the latter was adopted at an international conference held in Paris in 1896, but after it had been carried into effect in our own Nautical Almanac, professional jealousies brought about a modification of the plan that relegated the improved and modernized data to an appendix.

Professor Newcomb’s retirement from active service made the continuance of his great work on an adequate scale somewhat problematical, and his data on the moon’s motion were laid aside for a time until a grant from the newly organized Carnegie Institution in 1903 enabled him to employ the necessary assistance, and the work has since gone forward to completion.

What is the value of such work, and why should fame be the reward of him who pursues it successfully?  Professor Newcomb himself raises this question in his “Reminiscences,” and without attempting to answer it directly he notes that every civilized nation supports an observatory at great annual expense to carry on such research, besides which many others are supported by private or corporate contributions.  Evidently the consensus of public opinion must be that the results are worth at least a part of what they cost.  The question is included in the broader one of the value of all research in pure science.  Speaking generally, the object of this is solely to add to the sum of human knowledge, although not seldom some application to man’s physical needs springs unexpectedly from the resulting discoveries, as in the case of the dynamo or that of wireless telegraphy.  Possibly a more accurate description of the moon’s motion is unlikely to bring forth any such application, but those who applaud the achievements of our experts in mathematical astronomy would be quick to deny that their fame rests on any such possibility.

Passing now to Professor Newcomb’s “recreation,” as he called, it,—­political economy, we may note that his contributions to it were really voluminous, consisting of papers, popular articles and several books, including “The A B C of Finance” (1877) and “Principles of Political Economy” (1886).  Authorities in the science never really took these as seriously as they deserved, possibly because they regarded Professor Newcomb as scarcely