e whole subject, and followed the lines he indicated.
I gradually discovered the contrary, and introduced modified methods,
but did not entirely break away from the old trammels. Hill had never
been bound by them, and used Hansen's method from the beginning.
Had he given me a few demonstrations of its advantages, I should
have been saved a great deal of time and labor.

The part assigned to Hill was about the most difficult in the whole
work,--the theory of Jupiter and Saturn. Owing to the great mass of
these "giant planets," the inequalities of their motion, especially
in the case of Saturn, affected by the attraction of Jupiter, is
greater than in the case of the other planets. Leverrier failed to
attain the necessary exactness in his investigation of their motion.
Hill had done some work on the subject at his home in Nyack Turnpike
before I took charge of the office. He now moved to Washington,
and seriously began the complicated numerical calculations which
his task involved. I urged that he should accept the assistance of
less skilled computers; but he declined it from a desire to do the
entire work himself. Computers to make the duplicate computations
necessary to guard against accidental numerical errors on his part
were all that he required. He labored almost incessantly for about
ten years, when he handed in the manuscript of what now forms Volume
IV. of the "Astronomical Papers."

A pleasant incident occurred in 1884, when the office was honored
by a visit from Professor John C. Adams of England, the man who,
independently of Leverrier, had computed the place of Neptune, but
failed to receive the lion's share of the honor because it happened to
be the computations of the Frenchman and not his which led immediately
to the discovery of the planet. It was of the greatest interest to
me to bring two such congenial spirits as Adams and Hill together.

It would be difficult to find a more impressive example than
that afforded by Hill's career, of the difficulty of getting the
public to form and act upon sane judgments in such cases as his.
The world has the highest admiration for astronomical research, and
in this sentiment our countrymen are foremost. They spend hundreds
of thousands of dollars to promote it. They pay good salaries to
professors who chance to get a certain official position where they
may do good work. And here was perhaps the greatest living master in
the highest and most difficult f