order of the Russian Government in 1887. He was, of course, a member of
many scientific societies, at home and abroad, and was elected in 1869 to
our own National Academy of Sciences, becoming its vice-president in 1883.
In 1893 he was chosen one of the eight foreign associates of the Institute
of France,--the first native American since Benjamin Franklin to be so
chosen. Newcomb's most famous work as an astronomer,--that which gained
him world-wide fame among his brother astronomers,--was, as has been said,
too mathematical and technical to appeal to the general public among his
countrymen, who have had to take his greatness, in this regard, on trust.
They have known him at first hand chiefly as author or editor of popular
works such as his "Popular Astronomy" (1877); of his text-books on
astronomy, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus; of his books on
political economy, which science he was accustomed to call his
"recreation"; and of magazine articles on all sorts of subjects not
omitting "psychical research," which was one of the numerous by-paths into
which he strayed. He held at one time the presidency of the American
Society for Psychical Research.

The technical nature of his work in mathematical astronomy,--his
"profession," as he called it, in distinction to his "recreations" and
minor scientific amusements,--may be seen from the titles of one or two of
his papers: "On the Secular Variations and Mutual Relations of the Orbits
of the Asteroids" (1860); "Investigation of the Orbit of Neptune, with
General Tables of Its Motion" (1867); "Researches on the Motion of the
Moon" (1876); and so on. Of this work Professor Newcomb himself says, in
his "Reminiscences of an Astronomer" (Boston, 1903), that it all tended
toward one result,--the solution of what he calls "the great problem of
exact astronomy," the theoretical explanation of the observed motions of
the heavenly bodies.