Professor Newcomb's mind was comprehensive in its activity. One might have
thought that an intellect occupied to the last in carrying out one of the
most stupendous tasks ever attempted by a mathematical astronomer would
have had little time or little energy left for other things; but Newcomb
took his rest and pleasure in popular articles and interviews. Only a
short time before his death he published an essay on aeronautics that
attracted wide attention, drawing the conclusions that the aeroplane can
never be of much use either as a passenger-carrier or in war, but that the
dirigible balloon may accomplish something within certain lines, although
it will never put the railways and steamships out of business. In
particular, he treated with unsparing ridicule the panic fear of an aerial
invasion that so lately seized upon our transatlantic cousins.

Personally, Newcomb was an agreeable companion and a faithful friend. His
success was due largely to his tenacity of purpose. The writer's only
personal contact with him came through the "Standard Dictionary,"--of
whose definitions in physical science Newcomb had general oversight. On
one occasion he came into the office greatly dissatisfied with the
definition that we had framed for the word "magnet."--a conception almost
impossible to define in any logical way. We had simply enumerated the
properties of the thing,--a course which in the absence of authoritative
knowledge of their causes was the only rational procedure. But Newcomb's
mind demanded a logical treatment, and though he must have seen from the
outset that this was a forlorn hope, his tenacity of purpose kept him,
pencil in hand, writing and erasing alternately for an hour or more.
Finally he confessed that he could do no better than the following pair of
definitions,--"_Magnet_, a body capable of exerting magnetic force," and
"_Magnetic Force_, the force exerted by a magnet." With a hearty laugh at
this beautiful _circulus in definiendo_ he threw down his pencil, and the
imperfect and illogical office definition was accepted.

Logical as he was, however, he was in no sense bound by convention. His
economics, as has been said, was often unorthodox, and even in his
mathematical text-books he occasionally shocked the hide-bound. I well
remember an interesting discussion among members of the Yale mathematical
faculty just after the appearance of Newcomb's text-book of geometry, in
which he was unsparingly condemne