Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/135

 number of 42 figures. By means of these numbers and calculations which Adams made of the logs. of 2, 3, 5 and 7 to 263 places, he made a calculation of Euler's constant 0.577215 to 263 places. He also made a calculation of the modulus of the common logarithms to the same number of places. Mr. Shanks had previously calculated the above logarithms and the modulus of the common logarithms to 205 places, and Euler's constant to 110 places of decimals.

In 1881 on Airy's retirement from the Royal Observatory, the appointment was offered to Adams, but he declined it. He was not a business man, and probably already felt the effects of age. In 1884 he visited America, coming as a delegate to the International Prime Meridian Conference held at Washington. He also took part in the British Association meeting at Montreal, and the American Association meeting in Philadelphia. In 1889 he was afflicted by a severe illness, and after two further attacks he died on the 21st of January, 1892, in the 73d year of his age. He was buried in the Cambridge cemetery, which is not far from the Observatory. A medallion of Adams has been placed in Westminster Abbey close to the grave of Newton.

A Cambridge physician who knew him well thus sketches his character: "His earnest devotion to duty, his simplicity, his perfect self-lessness, were to all who knew his life at Cambridge a perpetual lesson, more eloquent than speech. From the time of his first great discovery scientific honors were showered upon him, but they left him as they found him— modest, gentle, and sincere. Controversies raged for a time around his name, national and scientific rivalries were stirred up concerning his work and its reception, but he took no part in them, and would generously have yielded to other's claims more than his greatest contemporaries would allow to be just. With a single mind for pure knowledge he pursued his studies, here bringing a whole chaos into cosmic order, there vindicating the supremacy of a natural law beyond the imagined limits of its operation; now tracing and abolishing errors that had crept into the calculations of the acknowledged masters of his craft,