Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/131

 clusions had been in the hands of Airy and Challis since 1845, and that Challis had actually been engaged in searching for the planet. The British astronomers were divided in opinion; some held that the fact that Adams' results had not been publicly announced deprived him of all claims in relation to the discovery. The Royal Society of London rather hastily (1846) awarded it highest honor, the Copley medal, to Leverrieral oneLeverrier alone [sic]; and in the Royal Astronomical Society a majority of the Council were in favor of awarding their gold medal to him; but a sufficient minority of the Council protested. Two years later the Royal Society made some amends by awarding the Copley medal to Adams.

In 1847 the Queen with Prince Albert visited the University of Cambridge; on this occasion the honor of knighthood was offered to Adams, then 28 years old, but he felt obliged to decline for the same reason as Airy had done before. The members of St. John's College, in honor of the brilliant achievement of one of their number founded the Adams prize, to be awarded biennially for the best essay on some prescribed subject in pure or applied mathematics; its value is about £225. In this year also, Prof. Benjamin Pierce of Harvard College published a paper in which he criticized the methods of Adams and Leverrier, contending that the period of Neptune differed so considerably from that of the hypothetical planet that the finding of the planet was partly due to a happy accident. Adams, on the occasion of the republication of his memoir in Lionville's Journal in 1877, replied that the objection did not hold on account of the perturbations considered lying within a fraction of the synodic periods of Neptune and Uranus. In this year Leverrier attended the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, in the company of Airy. The two discoverers of Neptune met then, and ever after manifested a high appreciation for each other. In 1876 when Adams was president of the Royal Astronomical Society he made an address on presenting a second gold medal to Leverrier for his theories of the four great planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Adams was by nature a calculator, not an observer or experi-