relegated the
improved and modernized data to an appendix.

Professor Newcomb's retirement from active service made the continuance of
his great work on an adequate scale somewhat problematical, and his data
on the moon's motion were laid aside for a time until a grant from the
newly organized Carnegie Institution in 1903 enabled him to employ the
necessary assistance, and the work has since gone forward to completion.

What is the value of such work, and why should fame be the reward of him
who pursues it successfully? Professor Newcomb himself raises this
question in his "Reminiscences," and without attempting to answer it
directly he notes that every civilized nation supports an observatory at
great annual expense to carry on such research, besides which many others
are supported by private or corporate contributions. Evidently the
consensus of public opinion must be that the results are worth at least a
part of what they cost. The question is included in the broader one of the
value of all research in pure science. Speaking generally, the object of
this is solely to add to the sum of human knowledge, although not seldom
some application to man's physical needs springs unexpectedly from the
resulting discoveries, as in the case of the dynamo or that of wireless
telegraphy. Possibly a more accurate description of the moon's motion is
unlikely to bring forth any such application, but those who applaud the
achievements of our experts in mathematical astronomy would be quick to
deny that their fame rests on any such possibility.

Passing now to Professor Newcomb's "recreation," as he called,
it,--political economy, we may note that his contributions to it were
really voluminous, consisting of papers, popular articles and several
books, including "The A B C of Finance" (1877) and "Principles of
Political Economy" (1886). Authorities in the science never really took
these as seriously as they deserved, possibly because they regarded
Professor Newcomb as scarcely orthodox. Some of his distinctions, however,
are of undoubted value and will live; for instance, that between the fund
and the flux of wealth, on which he insists in his treatises on finance.
As to Professor Newcomb's single excursion into fiction, a romance
entitled "His Wisdom the Defender," it is perhaps sufficient to say that,
like everything he attempted, it is at least worth notice. It is a sort of
cross between Jules Verne and Bulwer Lytton's "Coming Race."