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 known, the world recognized that the two astronomers had independently solved the problem of Uranus, and ascribed to each equal glory. The new planet, at first called Leverrier by F. Arago, received by general consent the neutral name of Neptune. Its mathematical prediction was not only an unsurpassed intellectual feat; it showed also that Newton’s law of gravitation, which Airy had almost called in question, prevailed even to the utmost bounds of the solar system.

The honour of knighthood was offered to Adams when Queen Victoria visited Cambridge in 1847; but then, as on a subsequent occasion, his modesty led him to decline it. The Royal Society awarded him its Copley medal in 1848. In the same year the members of St John’s College commemorated his success by founding in the university an Adams prize, to be given biennially for the best treatise on a mathematical subject. In 1851 he became president of the Royal Astronomical Society. His lay fellowship at St John’s College came to an end in 1852, and the existing statutes did not permit of his re-election. But Pembroke College, which possessed greater freedom, elected him in the following year to a lay fellowship, and this he held for the rest of his life. In 1858 he became professor of mathematics at St Andrews, but lectured only for a session, when he vacated the chair for the Lowndean professorship of astronomy and geometry at Cambridge. Two years later he succeeded Challis as director of the Observatory, where he resided until his death.

Although Adams’s researches on Neptune were those which attracted widest notice, the work he subsequently performed in relation to gravitational astronomy and terrestrial magnetism was not less remarkable. Several of his most striking contributions to knowledge originated in the discovery of errors or fallacies in the work of his great predecessors in astronomy. Thus in 1852 he published new and accurate tables of the moon’s parallax, which superseded J. K. Burckhardt’s, and supplied corrections to the theories of M. C. T. Damoiseau, G. A. A. Plana and P. G. D. de Pontécoulant. In the following year his memoir on the secular acceleration of the moon’s mean motion partially invalidated Laplace’s famous explanation, which had held its place unchallenged for sixty years. At first, Leverrier, Plana and other foreign astronomers controverted Adams’s result; but its soundness was ultimately established, and its fundamental importance to this branch of celestial theory has only developed further with time. For these researches the Royal Astronomical Society awarded him its gold medal in 1866. The great meteor shower of 1866 turned his attention to the Leonids, whose probable path and period had already been discussed by Professor H. A. Newton. Using a powerful and elaborate analysis, Adams ascertained that this cluster of meteors, which belongs to the solar system, traverses an elongated ellipse in 33 years, and is subject to definite perturbations from the larger planets, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. These results were published in 1867. Ten years later, when Mr. G. W. Hill of Washington expounded a new and beautiful method for dealing with the problem of the lunar motions, Adams briefly announced his own unpublished work in the same field, which, following a parallel course had confirmed and supplemented Hill’s. In 1874–1876 he was president of the Royal Astronomical Society for the second time, when it fell to him to present the gold medal of the year to Leverrier. The determination of the constants in Gauss’s theory of terrestrial magnetism occupied him at intervals for over forty years. The calculations involved great labour, and were not published during his lifetime. They were edited by his brother, Professor W. Grylls Adams, and appear in the second volume of the collected Scientific Papers. Numerical computation of this kind might almost be described as his pastime. The value of the constant known as Euler’s, and the Bernoullian numbers up to the 62nd, he worked out to an unimagined degree of accuracy. For Newton and his writings he had a boundless admiration; many of his papers, indeed, bear the cast of Newton’s thought. He laboured for many years at the task of arranging and cataloguing the great collection of Newton’s unpublished mathematical writings, presented in 1872 to the university by Lord Portsmouth, and wrote the account of them issued in a volume by the University Press in 1888. The post of astronomer-royal was offered him in 1881, but he preferred to pursue his peaceful course of teaching and research in Cambridge. He was British delegate to the International Prime Meridian Conference at Washington in 1884, when he also attended the meetings of the British Association at Montreal and of the American Association at Philadelphia. Five years later his health gave way, and after a long illness he died at the Cambridge Observatory on the 21st of January 1892, and was buried in St Giles’s cemetery, near his home. He married in 1863 Miss Eliza Bruce, of Dublin, who survived him. An international committee was formed for the purpose of erecting a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey; and there, in May 1895, a portrait medallion, by Albert Bruce Joy, was placed near the grave of Newton, and adjoining the memorials of Darwin and of Joule. His bust, by the same sculptor, stands opposite that of Sir John Herschel in the hall of St John’s College, Cambridge. Herkomer’s portrait is in Pembroke College; and Mogford’s, painted in 1851, is in the combination room of St John’s. Another bust, taken in his youth, belongs to the Royal Astronomical Society. A memorial tablet, with an inscription by Archbishop Benson, is placed in the Cathedral at Truro; and Mr Passmore Edwards erected a public institute in his honour at Launceston, near his birthplace.

ADAMS, JOHN QUINCY (1767–1848), eldest son of President John Adams, sixth president of the United States, was born on the 11th of July 1767, in that part of Braintree that is now Quincy, Massachusetts, and was named after John Quincy (1689–1767), his mother’s grandfather, who was for many years a prominent member of the Massachusetts legislature. In 1778, and again in 1780, young Adams accompanied his father to Europe; studying in Paris in 1778–1779 and at the university of Leiden in 1780. In 1780, also, he began to keep that diary which forms so conspicuous a record of the doings of himself and his contemporaries. In 1781, at the age of fourteen, he accompanied Francis Dana (1743–1811), American envoy to Russia, as his private secretary; but Dana was not received by the Russian government, and in 1782 Adams joined his father at Paris, where he acted as “additional secretary” to the American commissioners in the negotiation of the treaty of peace which concluded the War of American Independence. Instead of accompanying his father to London, he, of his own choice, returned to Massachusetts, graduated at Harvard College in 1787, three years later was admitted to practise at the bar and at once opened an office in Boston. A series of papers written by him in which he controverted some of Thomas Paine’s doctrines in the Rights of Man, and later another series in which he ably supported the neutral policy of the administration toward France and England, led to his appointment by Washington as minister to the Netherlands in May 1794. There was little for him to do at the Hague, but in the absence of a minister at London, he transacted certain public business with the English foreign secretary. In 1796 Washington appointed him minister to Portugal, but before his departure thither his father John Adams became president and changed his destination to Berlin (1797). While there, he negotiated (1799) a treaty of amity and commerce with Prussia. On Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800, the elder Adams recalled his son, who returned home in 1801. The next year, he was elected