Thomas Adams was a small tenant farmer in the parish of Laneast, at Lidcott, renting under John King Lethbridge, Esq., of Tregeare, in Laneast. He married Tabitha Knill Grylls, of Stoke Climsland, who inherited a very little land in this latter parish.
Laneast lies on the Inny River—that is to say, the village with its church occu-pies the southern slope of Laneast Down that falls to this beautiful stream. But Lidcott lies on the north side of the down, that rises to eight hundred feet above the sea, one long swelling mass of moor brown with heather, save when in August it blushes like a modest girl, the heather all a-rose with flower.
For three miles the highway from Camelford to Launceston crosses this moor, one white strip drawn through a mass of umber. At night the sheep that grazed on the down would lie on the warm road, and many a time have the coach-horses stumbled over them in the night.
On this road, about the year 546, S. Samson was pursuing his way from Pads-tow, where he had landed, to Southill. He had with him a wagon drawn by horses he had brought with him from Ireland, and as he proceeded over the down he was aware of music and dancing on the left-hand side of the road in the direction of Tregeare, and he found that the heathen people were ha-ving a festival about a rude upright stone. He stopped, harangued them, con-demned their idolatrous practice, and with his own hand cut a cross upon the stone.
It is possible that this is the very rude stone cross that still stands on the slope of the moor above Lidcott.
John Couch, son of Thomas Adams and Tabitha, was born at Lidcott on 5th January, 1819, but no notice of his baptism occurs in the parish register at La-neast. Possibly he may have been taken to Egloskerry.
He received his early education at a dame’s school in his native parish; but was early employed by his father to tend the sheep on Laneast Down. It was then and there, on that great upland stretch of moor, with a vast horizon about him, that, lying in the heather and looking up into the sky, the mystery of the hea-venly firmament laid hold of him. He soon learned to distinguish the planets from the fixed stars; he watched the rising and the setting of the constellations, Charles’s Wain revolving nightly about the extremest star in what he called the tail of the Plough; Orion with his twinkling belt and curved sword, “louting on one knee.”
To the west and south stood up against the evening glow the ridge of the Bod-min Moors, Brown Willy, Rough Tor, Kilmar, and Caradon. To the north not-hing interrupted the view, for there lay the vast Atlantic; and on stormy nights the boom of its waves might be heard from that highway over the down. To the east and south-east the far-off range of Dartmoor, blue as a vein in a girl’s temple, on a summer day.
Many a chiding did John Couch get from his father for being out late at night upon the moor; the old farmer was unable to understand what the attraction was which drew the lad from home and from his supper, to be out, eit-her lying on the road or leaning against the old granite cross, star-gazing. Hap-pily Mrs. Adams had a simple book on astronomy that had belonged to her fat-her, and this her son Jack devoured, and now he began to understand something of the motions of the heavenly bodies. He established a sundial on the window-sill of the parlour, and constructed out of cardboard an apparatus for taking the altitude of the sun.
His father, finding that his inclinations were not for farm work, sent him to study with a relative of his mother, the Rev. P. Couch Grylls, who had a school at Devonport, but later moved to Saltash. All his spare time John Couch spent in reading astronomical works, which he obtained from the library of the Mec-hanics’ Institute; he drew maps of constellations and computed celestial pheno-mena. A day long to be remembered by him as one of the happiest in his life was that in which he obtained a look through a telescope at the moon. “Why,” he exclaimed, “they have Brown Willy and Rough Tor up there!”
His account of a solar eclipse viewed at Devonport through a small spyglass got into print in a London paper. After three weeks’ watching he caught sight of Halley’s Comet on 16th October, 1839.
His father now with considerable effort arranged to send him to the University of Cambridge, and he entered S. John’s College as a poor sizar in October, 1839; he graduated as Senior Wrangler in 1843, and was first Smith’s prize-man, and soon elected Fellow and appointed tutor of his college.
At the age of twenty-two he was struck with the disturbance in the course of the planet Uranus, and he perceived that this must be due to the attraction pos-sessed by some other planet, as yet unseen and unsuspected, that produced these perturbations. How this led to the discovery of the planet Neptune shall be told from the Reminiscences of Caroline Fox:—
“1847, October 7th.—Dined at Carclew, and spent a very interesting evening. We met Professor Adams, the Bullers, the Lord of the Isles, and others. Adams is a quiet-looking man, with a broad forehead, a mild face, and an amiable and expressive mouth. I sat by him at dinner, and by general and dainty approaches got at the subject on which one most wished to hear him speak. He began very blushingly, but went on to talk in most delightful fashion, with large and lumi-nous simplicity, of some of the vast mathematical facts with which he is so conversant. The idea of the reversed method of reasoning, from an unknown to a known, with reference to astronomical problems dawned on him when an undergraduate, with neither time nor mathematics to work it out. The opposite system had always before been adopted. He, in common with many others, conceived that there must be a planet to account for the disturbances of Uranus; and when he had time he set to work at the process, in deep, quiet faith that the fact was there, and that his hitherto untried mathematical path was the one which must reach it; that there were no anomalies in the universe, but that, even here, and now, they could be explained and included in a higher law. The delight of working it out was far more than any notoriety could give, for his love of pure truth is evidently intense, an inward necessity, unaffected by all the penny trumpets of the world. Well, at length he fixed his point in space, and sent his mathematical evidence to Airy, the Astronomer Royal, who locked the papers up in his desk, partly from carelessness, partly from incredulity, for it seemed to him impossible that a man whose name was unknown to him sho-uld strike out a new path in mathematical science with any success. Moreover, his theory was, that if there were a planet, it would not be dis-covered for one hundred and sixty years; that is, until two revolutions of Ura-nus had been accomplished. Then came Leverrier’s equally original, though many months younger, demonstration; Gull’s immediate verification of it by observation; and then the other astronomers were all astir. Professor Adams speaks of those about whom the English scientific world is so indignant in a spirit of Christian philosophy, exactly in keeping with the mind of a man who has discovered a planet. He speaks with warmest admiration of Leverrier, spe-cially of his exhaustive method of making out the orbits of the comets, imagi-ning and disproving all tracks but the right one—a work of infinite labour. If the observer could make out distinctly but a very small part of a comet’s orbit, the mathematician would be able to prove what its course had been through all time. They enjoyed being a good deal together at the British Association Mee-ting at Oxford, though it was unfortunate for the intercourse of the fellow-workers that one could not speak French nor the other English. He had met with very little mathematical sympathy, except from Challis, of the Cambridge Observatory; but when his result was announced there was noise enough and to spare. He was always fond of star-gazing and speculation, and is already on the watch for another planet. Burnard told us that when Professor Adams came from Cambridge to visit his relatives in Cornwall he was employed to sell sheep for his father at a fair. He is a most good son and neighbour, and watch-ful in the performance of small acts of thoughtful kindness.”
“1863, July 2nd.—Have just returned from a visit to Professor Adams at Camb-ridge. He is so delightful in the intervals of business, enjoying all things, large and small, with a boyish zest. He showed and explained the calcula-ting machine (French, not Babbage’s), which saves him much in time and brain, as it can multiply or divide ten figures accurately. We came upon an ad-mirable portrait of him at S. John’s College, before he accepted a Pembroke Fellowship and migrated thither.”
The first mention of the name of Adams as the discoverer of Neptune was by Sir John Herschel, in the Athenæum, on October 3rd, 1845. And a letter from Professor Challis to that journal on 17th October described in detail the transac-tions between Adams, Airy, and himself. Naturally enough the French were highly incensed at the notion that an obscure Englishman had forestalled Lever-rier in the discovery, and Airy himself was annoyed at his own negligence in not looking into the memoir by Adams, and took up the matter with some per-sonal feeling. It was certainly startling to realize that the Astronomer Royal had had in his possession data that would have enabled the planet to be discovered nearly a year before Leverrier had, by a different course of argument and cal-culation, arrived at the conclusion that there existed a planet which was the dis-turbing element in the orbit of Uranus. As to Adams himself, he had not a par-ticle of conceit and pride in him; he did not care to have his name proclaimed as the discoverer. Forty years later, he said simply and characteristically that all he had wished for was that English astronomers to whom he had communica-ted the result of his calculations, pointing out the precise spot in the sky where a planet was to be found, would have taken the trouble to turn their telescopes upon that point and discover the planet, so that England might have had the full credit of the discovery.
His long-suppressed investigation was not laid before the Royal Astronomical Society till November 13th, 1846.
The publication, of course, stirred up much controversy, and the scientific world was divided into Adamite and anti-Adamite factions.
Adams refused knighthood in 1847, and declined the office of Astronomer Ro-yal on Airy’s retirement in 1881.
John Couch had a brother, William Grylls, also a man of some eminence in the scientific world. He was born at Lidcott 12th February, 1836, and became Pro-fessor of Natural Philosophy and of Astronomy in King’s College, London.
I was wont, when at Cambridge, to meet John Couch Adams at Professor Chal-lis’, and also at the house of the Rev. Harvey Goodwin, afterwards Bishop of Carlisle. Professor Adams took some notice of me, as coming from his neigh-bourhood, though not on the Cornish side of the Tamar. He was a small man, as simple as a child in many things. Indeed, he struck me forcibly by his great modesty and sweetness of manner. He loved a joke, and would laugh heartily over the very smallest. He loved children, and would play with them in their little games with infinite zest. Professor Glaisher, whom I also knew, wrote of him: “Adams was a man of learning as well as a man of science. He was an omnivorous reader, and his memory was exact and retentive. There were few subjects upon which he was not possessed of accurate information. Botany, ge-ology, history, and divinity, all had their share of his care and attention.”
He was always happy to return to his humble father’s farm; and after he was a noted man, on one of these occasions the old man sent him into Launceston with a drove of sheep to sell them in the market. He complied cheerfully, but how he succeeded in selling them I have not heard. This is the incident al-luded to by Caroline Fox given above.
“The honours showered upon him,” wrote Dr. Donald MacAlister, “left him as they found him—modest, gentle, and sincere.” He was not a man who ever as-serted himself.
He married in 1863 Eliza, daughter of Haliday Bruce, of Dublin. He died of a sudden illness on January 21st, 1892, and was buried in S. Giles’ Churchyard, Cambridge.
Portraits were taken of him by Mogford in 1851, and by Herkomer in 1888; both are in the Combination-room of St. John’s College, Cambridge.
A biographical notice of him was prefixed by Professor Glaisher to his scienti-fic works, edited by W. G. Adams, in 1896-8.
See also A. De Morgan’s Budget of Paradoxes, 1872, and the Mechanics’ Ma-gazine, 1846.
