Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/125



was born on the 5th of June, 1819, at a farmhouse seven miles from Launceston in Cornwall. His father was a tenant farmer, and so had been his ancestors for several generations. His mother, née Tabitha Knill Grylls, owned a small estate, inherited from an aunt named Grace Couch; hence the middle name of the mathematician. John Couch Adams was the oldest of seven children; he had three brothers and three sisters; his brother William Grylls Adams became a professor of physics, and has attained to scientific distinction although not comparable to that of his brother. Adams was thus of the old Welsh stock located in the south-western peninsula of England. He received his primary education at the village school near the farm, where at ten years of age he studied algebra. In his own home there was a small library, which also had been inherited by his mother, and which included some books on astronomy. He constructed a simple instrument to determine the elevation of the sun. "It consisted of a vertical circular card with graduated edge, from the centre of which a plumb bob was suspended. Two small square pieces of card, with a pinhole in each, projected from the circular disc at right angles to its face at opposite ends of a diameter. The card was to be so placed that the sun shone through the pin holes, and the elevation was read off on the circle."

At twelve years of age he was placed in a private school taught by the Rev. John Couch Grylls, a cousin of his mother, the subjects of instruction being classics and mathematics. Here