American Academy of Art and Sciences; honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg; of the Cambridge (England) Philosophical Society; of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia; of the Imperial Geographic Society of Russia, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce of London; the Bureau of Longitudes of Paris; the Manchester (England) Literary and Philosophical Society; the Heidelberg Literary university; the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. He received the Royal Astronomical Society gold medal from England in 1874; the Huygens gold medal from Holland in 1878; the Royal Society gold medal from England in 1890; the Bruce medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1898; the Schubert prize from Russia; and the Sylvester medallion from the Johns Hopkins university. In 1906 the Emperor of Germany conferred on him the Order of Merit for Sciences and Arts, "Pour le Merite," "Fur Wissenschaften und Kiinste." In 1887 the Russian government ordered his portrait for the Imperial observatory of Pulkowa, and 1896 another portrait was ordered for the Johns Hopkins university. In 1888 the Imperial university of Tokio, Japan, officially presented him with a fine pair of bronze vases. He assisted in drawing up the contract for the great thirty inch telescope for the Pulkowa observatory, Russia, and for this service to science received in 1888 a magnificent vase of jasper mounted on a marble pedestal, in the name of the Czar. He also assisted Alvan G. Clark in planning and testing the thirty-six inch telescope placed in the Lick observatory.
He has lectured at Harvard university, Cambridge; at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, and before other universities and educational bodies, on finance and political economy as well as on astronomy; and he delivered the opening addresses at the Dedications of the Flower and the Yerkes Astronomical observatories and at other observatories.
The principal work of Professor Newcomb has been in the various departments of mathematical astronomy, especially the theories of the motions of the moon and planets, and the construction of tables by which eclipses and other celestial phenomena may be predicted. The question of the moon's motion has received his especial attention because it offers a problem which has not yet been completely solved on account of its almost insuperable difficulties. This problem grows out of small discrepancies between the motion of the moon through
