altogether, and partly, it seems, in the hope that Pinckney
should in fact receive more votes than Adams, and thus, in
accordance with the system then obtaining, be elected president,
though he was intended for the second place on the Federalist
ticket. Adams's four years as chief magistrate (1797--1801)
were marked by a succession of intrigues which embittered
all his later life; they were marked, also, by events, such
as the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which brought
discredit on the Federalist party. Moreover, factional strife
broke out within the party itself; Adams and Hamilton became
alienated, and members of Adams's own cabinet virtually looked
to Hamilton rather than to the president as their political
chief. The United States was, at this time, drawn into the
vortex of European complications, and Adams, instead of taking
advantage of the militant spirit which was aroused, patriotically
devoted himself to securing peace with France, much against
the wishes of Hamilton and of Hamilton's adherents in the
cabinet. In 1800, Adams was again the Federalist candidate
for the presidency, but the distrust of him in his own
party, the popular disapproval of the Alien and Sedition
Acts and the popularity of his opponent, Thomas Jefferson,
combined to cause his defeat. He then retired into private
life. On the 4th of July 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary
of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, he died at
Quincy. Jefferson died on the same day. In 1764 Adams had married
Miss Abigail Smith (1744-1818), the daughter of a Congregational
minister at Weymouth, Massachusetts. She was a woman of much
ability, and her letters, written in an excellent English
style, are of great value to students of the period in which she
lived. President John Quincy Adams was their eldest son.
AUTHORITIES.--C. F. Adams, The Works of John Aadms, with
Life (10 vols., Boston, 1850-1856); John and Abigail Adams,
Familiar Letters during thc Revolution (Boston, 1875);
J. T. Morse, John Adams (Boston, 1885: later edition,
1899), in the ``American Statesmen Series''; and Mellen
Chamberlain, John Adams, the Statesman of the Revolution;
with other Essays and Addresses (Boston, 1898). (E. CH.)
ADAMS, JOHN COUCH (1819--1892), British astronomer, was born
at Lidcot farmhouse, Laneast, Cornwall, on the 5th of June
1819. His father, Thomas Adams, was a tenant farmer; his
mother, Tabitha Knill Grylls, inherited a small estate at
Badharlick. From the village school at Laneast he went, at
the age of twelve, to Devonport, where his mother's cousin,
the Rev. John Couch Grylls, kept a private school. His
promise as a mathematician induced his parents to send him to
the university of Cambridge, and in October 1839 he entered
as a sizar at St John's College. He graduated B.A. in 1843
as the senior wrangler and first Smith's prizeman of his
year. While still an undergraduate he happened to read
of certain unexplained irregularities in the motion of
the planet Uranus, and determined to investigate them as
soon as possible, with a view to ascertaining whether they
might not be due to the action of a remote undiscovered
planet. Elected fellow of his college in 1843, he at once
proceeded to attack the novel problem. It was this: from
the observed perturbations of a known planet to deduce by
calculation, assuming only Newton's law of gravitation, the
mass and orbit of an unknown disturbing body. By September
1845 he obtained his first solution, and handed to Professor
Challis, the director of the Cambridge Observatory, a paper
giving the elements of what he described as ``the new planet.''
On the 21st of October 1845 he left at Greenwich Observatory,
for the information of Sir George Airy, the astronomer-royal, a
similar document, still preserved among the archives. A fortnight
afterwards Airy wrote asking for information about a point in the
solution. Adams, who thought the query unessential, did not
reply, and Airy for some months took no steps to verify by
telescopic search the results of the young mathematician's
investiation. Meanwhile, Leverrier, on the 10th of November
1845, presented to the French Academy a memoir on Uranus,
showing that the existing theory failed to account for its
motion. Unaware of Adams's work, he attempted a like inquiry,
and on the 1st of June 1846, in a second memoir, gave the
position, but not the mass or orbit, of the disturbing body
whose existence was presumed. The longitude he assigned
differed by only 1 deg. from that predicted by Adams in the
document which Airy possessed. The latter was struck by the
coincidence, and mentioned it to the Board of Visitors of
the Observatory, James Challis and Sir John Herschel being
present. Herschel, at the ensuing meeting of the British
Association early in September, ventured accordingly to
predict that a new planet would shortly be discovered.
Meanwhile Airy had in July suggested to Challis that the
planet should be sought for with the Cambridge equatorial.
The search was begun by a laborious method at the end of the
month. On the 8th and 12th of August, as afterwards
appeared, the planet was actually observed; but owing to
the want of a proper star-map it was not then recognized as
planetary. Leverrier, still ignorant of these occurrences,
presented on the 31st of August 1846 a third memoir, giving
for the first time the mass and orbit of the new body. He
communicated his results by letter to Dr Gane, of the Berlin
Observatory, who at once examined the suggested region of the
heavens. On the 23rd of September he detected near the
predicted place a small star unrecorded in the map, and next
evening found that it had a proper motion. No doubt remained
that ``Leverrier's planet'' had been discovered. On the
announcement of the fact, Herschel and Challis made known
that Adams had already calculated the planet's elements and
position. Airy then at length published an account of the
circumstances, and Adams's memoir was printed as an appendix
to the Nautical Almanac. A keen controversy arose in France
and England as to the merits of the two astronomers. In the
latter country much surprise was expressed at the apathy of
Airy; in France the claims made for an unknown Englishman
were resented as detracting from the credit due to Leverrier's
achievement. As the indisputable facts became 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 Pontecoulant. 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 astronomersi 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 1/4 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
