Chapter XXX: Act 1892: , it is optional to cite most important acts up (4)

In 1785 John Adams was appointed the first of a long line of able and distinguished American ministers to the court of St James's. When he was presented to his former sovereign, George III. intimated that he was aware of Mr Adams's lack of confidence in the French government. Replying, Mr Adams admitted it, closing with the outspoken sentiment: ``I must avow to your Majesty that I have no attachment but to my own country''--a phrase which must have jarred upon the monarch's sensibilities. While in London Adams published a work entitled A Defence of the Constitution of Government of the United States (1787). In this work he ably combated the views of Turgot and other European writers as to the viciousness of the frame-work of the state governments. Unfortunately, in so doing, he used phrases savouring of aristocracy which offended many of his countrymen,---as in the sentence in which he suggested that ``the rich, the well-born and the able'' should be set apart from other men in a senate. Partly for this reason, while Washington had the vote of every elector in the first presidential election of 1789, Adams received only thirty-four out of sixty-nine. As this was the second largest number he was declared vice-president, but he began his eight years in that office (1789-- 1797) with a sense of grievance and of suspicion of many of the leading men. Differences of opinion with regard to the policies to be pursued by the new government gradually led to the formation of two well-defined political groups---the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans--and Adams became recognized as one of the leaders, second only to Alexander Hamilton, of the former.

In 1796, on the refusal of Washington to accept another election, Adams was chosen president, defeating Thomas Jefferson; though Alexander Hamilton and other Federalists had asked that an equal vote should be cast for Adams and Thomas Pinckney, the other Federalist in the contest, partly in order that Jefferson, who was elected vice-president, might be excluded 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 medallion, by Albert Bruce Joy, was placed near the grave of Newton, and adjoining the memorials of Darwin and of Joule. His bust, by the same sculptor, stands opposite that of Sir John Herschel in the hall of St John's College, Cambridge. Herkomer's portrait is in Pembroke College; and Mogford's, painted in 1851, is in the combination room of St John's. Another bust, taken in his youth, belongs to the Royal Astronomical Society. A memorial tablet, with an inscription by Archbishop Benson, is placed in the Cathedral at Truro; and Mr Passmore Edwards erected a public institute in his honour at Launceston, near his birthplace.

The Scientific Papers of John Couch Adams, 4to, vol. i. (1896), and vol. ii. (1900), edited by William Grylls Adams and Ralph Allen Sampson, with a memoir by Dr J. W. L. Glaisher, were published by the Cambridge University Press. The first volume contains his previously published writings; the second those left in manuscript, including the substance of his lectures on the Lunar Theory. A collection, virtually complete, of Adams's papers regarding the discovery of Neptune was presented by Mrs Adams to the library of St John's College. A description of them by Professor Sampson was inserted in the Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society (vol. liv. p. 143). Consult: Month. Notices Roy. Astr. Soc., liii. 184; Observatory, xv. 174; Nature, xxxiv. 565, xlv. 301; Astr. Journal, No. 254; R. Grant, Hist. of Physical Astronomy, p. 168; Edinburgh Review, No. 381, p. 72.

ADAMS, JOHN QUINCY (1767-1848), eldest son of President John Adams, sixth president of the United States, was born on the 11th of July 1767, in that part of Braintree that is now Quincy, Massachusetts, and was named after John Quincy (1689--1767), his mother's grandfather, who was for many years a prominent member of the Massachusetts legislature. In 1778, and again in 1780, young Adams accompanied his father to Europe; studying in Paris in 1778-1779 and at the university of Leiden in 1780. In 1780, also, he began to keep that diary which forms so conspicuous a record of the doings of himself and his contemporaries. In 1781, at the age of fourteen, he accompanied Francis Dana (1743-1811), American envoy to Russia, as his private secretary; but Dana was not received by the Russian government, and in 1782 Adams joined his father at Paris, where he acted as ``additional secretary'' to the American commissioners in the negotiation of the treaty of peace which concluded the War of American Independence. Instead of accompanying his father to London, he, of his own choice, returned to Massachusetts, graduated at Harvard College in 1787, three years later was admitted to practise at the bar and at once opened an office in Boston. A series of papers written by him in which he controverted some of Thomas Paine's doctrines in the Rights of Man, and later another series in which he ably supported the neutral policy of the administration toward France and England, led to his appointment by Wnshington as minister to the Netherlands in May 1794. There was little for him to do at the Hague, but in the absence of a minister at London, he transacted certain public business with the English foreign secretary. In 1796 Washington appointed him minister to Portugal, but before his departure thither his father John Adams became president and changed his destination to Berlin (1797). While there, he negotiated (1799) a treaty of amity and commerce with Prussia. On Thomas Jefferson's election to the presidency in 1800, the elder Adams recalled his son, who returned home in 1801. The next year, he was elected to the Massachusetts senate, and in 1803 was sent to Washington as a member of the Senate of the United States.

Up to this time, John Quincy Adams was regarded as belonging to the Federalist party, but he now found its general policy displeasing to him, was frowned upon, as the son of his father, by the followers of Alexander Hamilton, and found himself nearly powerless as an unpopular member of an unpopular minority. He was not now, and indeed never was, a strict party man. On the first important question that came before him in the Senate, the acquisition of Louisiana, he voted with the Republicans, regardless of the opposition of his own section. In December 1807 he warmly seconded Jefferson's suggestion of an embargo and vigorously urged instant action, saying: ``The president has recommended the measure on his high responsibility. I would not consider, I would not deliberate; I would act!'' Within five hours the Senate had passed the Embargo Bill and sent it to the House. The support of a measure so unpopular in New England caused him to be hated by the Federalists there and cost him his seat in the Senate; his successor was chosen on the 3rd of June 1808, several months before the usual time of filling the vacancy, and five days later Adams resigned. In the same year he attended the Republican congressional caucus which nominated Madison for the presidency, and thus definitely joined the Republicans. From 1806 to 1809 Adams was professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard.

In 1809 President Madison sent Adams to Russia to represent the United States. He arrived at St Petersburg at the psychological moment when the tsar had made up his mind to break with Napoleon. Adams therefore met with a favourable reception and a disposition to further the interests of American commerce in every possible way. On the outbreak of the war between the United States and England in 1812, he was still at St Petersburg. In September of that year, the Russian government suggested that the tsar was willing to act as mediator between the two belligerents. Madison precipitately accepted this proposition and sent Albert Gallatin and James Bayard to act as commissioners with Mr Adams; but England would have nothing to do with it. In August 1814, however, these gentlemen, with Henry Clay and Jonathan Russell, began negotiations with English commissioners which resulted in the signature of the treaty of Ghent on the 24th of December of that year. After this Adams visited Paris, where he witnessed the return of Napoleon from Elba, and then went to London, where, with Henry Clay and Albert Gallatin, he negotiated (1815) a ``Convention to Regulate Commerce and Navigation.'' Soon afterwards he became U.S. minister to Great Britain, as his father had been before him, and as his son, Charles Francis Adams, was after him. After accomplishing little in London, he returned to the United States in the summer of 1817 to become secretary of state in the cabinet of President Monroe.

As secretary of state, Adams played the leading part in two most important episodes--the acquisition of Florida and the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine. Ever since the acquisition of Louisiana successive administrations had sought to include a part at least of Florida in that purchase. In 1819, after long negotiations, Adams succeeded in bringing the Spanish minister to the point of signing a treaty in which the Spaniards abandoned all claims to territory east of the Mississippi, and the United States relinquished all claim to what is now known as Texas. Before the Spanish government ratified the treaty in 1820, Mexico, including Texas, had thrown off allegiance to the mother country, and the United States had occupied Florida by force of arms. The Monroe Doctrine (q.v.) rightly bears the name of the president who in 1823 assumed the responsibility for its promulgation; but it was primarily the work of John Quincy Adams. The eight years of Monroe's presidency (1817-1825) are known as the ``Era of Good Feeling.'' As his second term drew to a close, there was a great lack of good feeling among his official advisers, three of whom--Adams, secretary of state, Calhoun, secretary of war, and Crawford, secretary of the treasury--aspired to succeed him in his high office. In addition, Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson were also candidates. Calhoun was nominated for the Vice-presidency. Of the other four, Jackson received 99 electoral votes, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37; as no one had a majority, the decision was made by the House of Representatives, which was confined in its choice to the three candidates who had received the largest number of votes. Clay, who was speaker of the House of Representatives, and had for years assumed a censorious attitude toward Jackson, cast his influence for Adams and thereby secured his election on the first ballot. A few days later Adams offered Clay the secretaryship of state, which was accepted. The wholly unjust and baseless charge of ``bargain and corruption'' followed, and the feud thus created between Adams and Jackson greatly influenced the history of the United States.

Up to this point Adams's career had been almost uniformly successful, but his presidency (1825--1829) was in most respects a failure, owing to the virulent opposition of the Jacksonians; in 1828 Jackson was elected president over Adams. It was during his administration that irreconcilable differences developed between the followers of Adams and the followers of Jackson, the former becoming known as the National Republicans, who with the Anti-Masons were the precursors of the Whigs. In 1829 Adams retired to private life in the town of Quincy; but only for a brief period, for in 1830, largely by Anti-Masonic votes, he was elected a member of the national House of Representatives. On its being suggested to him that his acceptance of this position would degrade an ex-president, Adams replied that no person could be degraded by serving the people as a representative in congress or, he added, as a selectman of his town. His service in congress from 1831 until his death is, in some respects, the most noteworthy part of his career. Throughout he was conspicuous as an opponent of the extension of slavery, though he was never technically an abolitionist, and in particular he was the champion in the House of Representatives of the right of petition at a time when, through the influence of the Southern members, this right was, in practice, denied by that body. His prolonged fight for the repeal of the so-called ``Gag Laws'' is one of the most dramatic contests in the history of congress. The agitation for the abolition of slavery, which really began in earnest with the establishment of the Liberator by William Lloyd Garrison in 1831, soon led to the sending of innumerable petitions to congress for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, over which the Federal government had jurisdiction, and for other action by congress with respect to that institution. These petitions were generally sent to Adams for presentation. They aroused the anger of the proslavery members of congress, who, in 1836, brought about the passage of the first ``Gag Rule,'' the Pinckney Resolution, presented by Henry L. Pinckney, of South Carolina. It provided that all petitions relating to slavery should be laid on the table without being referred to committee or printed; and, in substance, this resolution was re-adopted at the beginning of each of the immediately succeeding sessions of congress, the Patton Resolution being adopted in 1837, the Atherton Resolution, or ``Atherton Gag,'' in 1838, and the Twenty-first Rule in 1840 and subsequently until repealed. Adams contended that these ``Gag Rules'' were a direct violation of the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution, and refused to be silenced on the question, fighting for repeal with indomitable courage, in spite of the bitter denunciation of his opponents. Each year the number of anti-slavery petitions received and presented by him increased; perhaps the climax was in 1837, when Adams presented a petition from twenty-two slaves, and, when threatened by his opponents with censure, defended himself with remarkable keenness and ability. At each session, also, the majority against him decreased until in 1844 his motion to repeal the Twenty-first Rule was carried by a vote of 108 to 80 and his battle was won. On the 21st of February 1848, after having suffered a previous stroke of apoplexy, he fell insensible on the floor of the Representatives' chamber, and two days later died. Few men in American public life have possessed more intrinsic worth, more independence, more public spirit and more ability than Adams, but throughout his political career he was handicapped by a certain reserve, a certain austerity and coolness of manner, and by his consequent inability to appeal to the imaginations and affections of the people as a whole. He had, indeed, few intimate political or personal friends, and few men in American history have, during their lifetime, been regarded with so much hostility and attacked with so much rancour hy their political opponents.

AUTHORITIES.--J. T. Morse, John Quincy Adams (Boston, 1883; new edition, 1899); Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of, John Quincy Adams (Boston, 1858); C. F. Adams (ed.), Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, comprising portions of his diary from 1795 to 1848 (12 vols., Philadelphia. 1874-1877). (E. CH.)

ADAMS, SAMUEL (1722--1803), American statesman, was born at Boston, Massachusetts, on the 27th of September 1722. He was a second cousin to the elder John Adams. His father, whose Christian name was also Samuel, was a wealthy and prominent citizen of Boston, who took an active part in the politics of the town, and was a member of the Caucus (or Caulker's) Club, with which the political term ``caucus'' is said to have originated; his mother was Mary Fifield. Young Adams graduated from Harvard College in 1740, and three years later, on attaining the degree of A.M., chose for his thesis, ``Whether it be Lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the Commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved.'' Which side he took, and how the argument proceeded, is not known, but the subject was one which well forecasted his career. He began the study of law in response to his father's advice; he discontinued it in response to his mother's disapproval. He repeatedly failed in business, notably as manager of a malt-house, largely because of his incessant attention to politics; but in the Boston town-meeting he became a conspicuous example of the efficiency of that institution for training in statecraft. He has, indeed, been called the ``Man of the Town Meeting.'' About 1748 he began to take an important part in the affairs of the town, and became a leader in the debates of a political club which he was largely instrumental in organizing, and to whose weekly publication, the Public Advertiser, he contributed numerous articles. From 1756 to 1764 he was one of the town's tax-collectors, but in this office he was unsuccessful, his easy business methods resulting in heavy arrears.

Samuel Adams first came into wider prominence at the beginning of the Stamp Act episode, in 1764, when as author of Boston's instructions to its representatives in the general court of Massachusetts he urged strenuous opposition to taxation by act of parliament. The next year he was for the first time elected to the lower house of the general court, in which he served until 1774, after 1766 as clerk. As James Otis's vigour and influence declined, Adams took a more and more prominent place in the revolutionary councils; and, contrary to the opinion of Otis and Benjamin Franklin, he declared that colonial representation in parliament was out of the question and advised against any form of compromise. Many of the Massachusetts revolutionary documents, including the famous ``Massachusetts Resolves'' and the circular letter to the legislatures of the other colonies, are from his pen; but owing to the fact that he usually acted as clerk to the House of Representatives and to the several committees of which he was a member, documents were written by him which expressed the ideas of the committee as a whole. There can be no question, however, that Samuel Adams was one of the first, if not the first, of American political leaders to deny the legislative power of parliament and to desire and advocate separation from the mother country.

To promote the ends he had in view he suggested non-importation, instituted the Boston committees ofcorrespondence, urged that a Continental Congress be called, sought out and introduced into public service such allies as John Hancock, Joseph Warren and Josiah Quincy, and wrote a vast number of articles for the newspapers, especially the Boston Gazette, over a multitude of signatures. He was, in fact, one of the most voluminous and influential political writers of his time. His style is clear, vigorous and epigrammatic; his arguments are characterized by strength of logic, and, like those of other patriots, are, as the dispute advances, based less on precedent and documentary authorities and more on ``natural right.'' Although he lacked oratorical fluency, his short speeches, like his writings, were forceful; his plain dress and unassuming ways helped to make him extremely popular with the common people, in whom he had much greater faith than his cousin John had; and, above all, he was an eminently successful manager of men. Shrewd, wily, adroit, unfailingly tactful, an adept in all the arts of the politician, he is considered to have done more than any other one man, in the years immediately preceding the War of Independence, to mould and direct public opinion in his community.

The intense excitement which followed the ``Boston Massacre'' Adams skilfully used to secure the removal of the soldiers from the town to a fort in the harbour. He it was, also, who managed the proceedings of the ``Boston Tea Party,'' and later he was moderator of the convention of Massachusetts towns called to protest against the Boston Port Bill. One of the objects of the expedition sent by Governor Thomas Gage to Lexington (q.v.) and Concord on April 18-19, 1775, was the capture of Adams and John Hancock, temporarily staying in Lexington, and when Gage issued his proclamation of pardon on June 12 he excepted these two, whose offences, he said, were ``of too flagitious a Nature to admit of any other Consideration than that of condign Punishment.''

As a delegate to the Continental Congress, from 1774 to 1781, Samuel Adams continued vigorously to oppose any concession to the British government; strove for harmony among the several colonies in the common cause; served on numerous committees, among them that to prepare a plan of confederation; and signed the Declaration of Independence. But he was rather a destructive than a constructive statesman, and his most important service was in organizing the forces of revolution before 1775. In 1779 he was a member of the convention which framed the constitution of Massachusetts that was adopted in 1780, and is still, with some amendments, the organic law of the commonwealth and one of the oldest fundamental laws in existence. He was one of the three members of the sub-committee which actually drafted that instrument; and although John Adams is generally credited with having performed the principal part of that task, Samuel Adams was probably the author of most of the bill of rights. In 1788, Samuel Adams was a member of the Massachusetts convention to ratify the Constitution of the United States. When he first read that instrument he was very much opposed to the consolidated government which it provided, but was induced to befriend it by resolutions which were passed at a mass meeting of Boston mechanics or ``tradesmen''---his own firmest supporters---and by the suggestion that its ratification should be accompanied by a recommendation of amendments designed chiefly to supply the omission of a bill of rights. Without his aid it is probable that the constitution would not have been ratified by Massachusetts. From 1789 to 1794 Adams was lieutenant-governor of his state, and from 1794 to 1797 was governor. After the formation of parties he became allied with the Democratic-Republicans rather than with the Federalists. He died on the 2nd of October 1803, at Boston.

AUTHORITIES.--Life, and Public Services of Samuel Adams (3 vols., Boston, 1863), by W. V. Wells, Adams's great-grandson--a valuable biography, containing a mass of information, but noticeably biassed: J. K. Hosmer's Samuel Adams (Boston, 1885), an excellent short biography in the ``American Statesmen Series'': M. C. Tyler's Literary History of the American Revolution (2 vols.,New Vork, 1897): and H. A. Cushing (ed.), The Writings of Samuel Adams (4 vols., New York, 1904-1908). (E. CH.)

ADAMS, THOMAS (d. c. 1655), English divine, was, in 1612, ``a preacher of the gospel at Willington,'' in Bedfordshire, where he is found until 1614, and whence issued his Heaven and Earth Reconciled, The Devil's Banquet and other works. In 1614-1615 he was at Wingrave, in Buckinghamshire, probably as vicar, and published a number of works in quick succession; in 1618 he held the preachership at St Gregory's, under St Paul's Cathedral, and was ``observant chaplain'' to Sir Henry Montague, the lord chief justice of England. These bare facts we gather from epistles-dedicatory and epistles to the reader, and title-pages. These epistles show him to have been on the most friendly terms with some of the foremost men in state and church, though his ardent protestantism offended Laud and hindered his preferment. his ``occasionally'' printed sermons, when collected in 1629, placed him beyond all comparison in the van of the preachers of England, and had something to do with shaping John Bunyan. He equals Jeremy Taylor in brilliance of fancies, and Thomas Fuller in wit. Robert Southey calls him ``the prose Shakespeare of Puritan theologians.'' His numerous works display great learning, classical and patristic, and are unique in their abundance of stories, anecdotes, aphorisms and puns.

His worns were edited in J. P. Nichol's Puritan Divines, by J. Angus and T. Smith (3 vols. 8vo, 1862).

ADAMS, WILLIAM (d. 1620), English navigator, was born at Gillingham, near Chatham, England. When twelve years old he was apprenticed to the seafaring life, afterwards entering the British navy, and later serving the Company of Barbary merchants for a number of years as master and pilot. Attracted by the Dutch trade with India, he shipped as pilot major with a little fleet of five ships despatched from the Texel in 1598 by a company of Rotterdam merchants. The vessels, boats ranging from 75 to 250 tons and crowded with men, were driven to the coast of Guinea, where the adventurers attacked the island of Annabon for supplies, and finally reached the straits of Magellan. Scattered by stress of weather the following spring the ``Charity,'' with Adams on board, and the ``Hope,'' met at length off the coast of Chile, where the captains of both vessels lost their lives in an encounter with the Indians. In fear of the Spaniards, the remaining crews determined to sail across the Pacific. On this voyage the ``Hope'' was lost, but in April 1600 the ``Charity,'' with a crew of sick and dying men, was brought to anchor off the island of Kiushiu, Japan. Adams was summoned to Osaka and there examined by Iyeyasu, the guardian of the young son of Taiko Sama, the ruler, who had just died. His knowledge of ships and shipbuilding, and his nautical smattering of mathematics, raised him in the estimation of the shogun, and he was subsequently presented with an estate at Hemi near Yokosuka; but was refused permission to return to England. In 1611 news came to him of an English settlement in Bantam, and he wrote asking for help. In 1613 Captain John Saris arrived at Hirado in the ship ``Clove'' with the object of establishing a trading factory for the East India Company, and after obtaining the necessary concessions from the shogun, Adams postponed his voyage home (permission for which had now been given him) in order to take a leading part, under Richard Cocks, in the organization of this new English settlement. He had already married a Japanese woman, by whom he had a family, and the latter part of his life was spent in the service of the English trading company, for whom he undertook a number of voyages to Siam in 1616, and Cochin China in 1617 and 1618. He died on the 16th of May 1620, some three years before the dissolution of the English factory. His Japanese title was Anjin Sama, and his memory was preserved in the naming of a street in Yedo, Anjin Cho (Pilot Street), and by an annual celebration on June 15 in his honour.

See England's Earliest Intercourse with Japan, by C. W. Hillary (1905; Letters written by the English Residents in Japan, ed. by N. Murakami (1900, containing Adams's Letters reprinted from Memorials of the Empire of Japan, ed. by T. Rundall, Hakluyt Society, 1850); Diary of Richard Cocks, with preface by N. Murakami (1899, reprinted from the Hakluyt Society ed. 1883); R. Hildreth's Japan (1835); J. Harris's Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca (1764), i. 856; Voyage of John Saris, ed. by Sir E. M. Satow (Hakluyt Society, 1900); Asiatic Society of Japan Transactions, xxvi. (sec. 1898) pp. 1 and 194, where four more hitherto unpublished letters of Adams are given; Collection of State Papers; East Indies, China and Japan. The MS. of his logs written during his voyages to Siam and China is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

ADAMS, a township in the extreme N. of Berkshire county, N.W. Massachusetts, U.S.A., having an area of 23 sq. m. Pop. (1880) 5591; (1890) 9213; (1900) 11,134, of whom 4376 were foreign-born; (1910, census) 13,026. It includes a portion of the valley of the Hoosac river, extending to the Hoosac Range on the E., and on the W. to Mt. Williams (3040 ft.), and Grey'lock Mountain (3535 ft ), partly in Williamstown, and the highest point in the state. The valley portion is level and contains several settlement centres, the largest of which, a busy industrial village (manufactures of cotton and paper), bears the same name as the township, and is on a branch of the Boston and Albany railroad. The village is the nearest station to Greylock, which can be easily ascended, and affords fine views of the Hoosac and Housatonic valleys, the Berkshire Hills and the Green Mountains; the mountain has been a state timber reservation since 1898. The township's principal industry is the manufacture of cotton goods, the value of which in 1905 ($4,621,261) was 84.1% of the value of the township's total factory products; in 1905 no other place in the United States showed so high a degree of specialization in this industry. The township (originally ``East Hoosuck'') was surveyed and defined in 1749. Fort Massachusetts, at one time within its bounds, was destroyed in 1746 by the French. An old Indian trail between the Hudson and Connecticut valley ran through the township, and was once a leading outlet of the Berkshire country. Adams was incorporated in 1778, and was named in honour of Samuel Adams, the revolutionary leader. Part of Adams was included in the new township of Cheshire in 1793, and North Adams was set off as a separate township in 1878.

ADAM'S APPLE, the movable projection, more prominent in males than females, formed in the front part of the throat by the thyroid cartilage of the larynx. The name was given from a legend that a piece of the forbidden fruit lodged in Adam's throat. The ``Adam's apple'' is one of the particular points of attack in the Japanese system of self-defence known as jiu-jitsu.

ADAM'S BRIDGE, or RAMA'S BRIDGE, a chain of sandbanks extending from the island of Manaar, near the N.W. coast of Ceylon to the island of Rameswaram, off the Indian coast, and lying between the Gulf of Manaar on the S.W. and Palk Strait on the N.E. It is more than 30 m. long and offers a serious impediment to navigation. Some of the sandbanks are dry; and no part of the shoal has a greater depth than 3 or 4 ft. at high water, except three tortuous and intricate channels which have recently been dredged to a sufficient depth to admit the passage of vessels, so as to obviate the long journey round the island of Ceylon which was previously necessary. Geological evidence shows that this gap was once bridged by a continuous isthmus which according to the temple records was breached by a violent storm in 1480. Operations for removing the obstacles in the channel and for deepening and widening it were begun as long ago as 1838. A service of the British India Steam Navigation Company's steamers has been established between Negapatam and Colombo through Palk Strait and this narrow passage.

ADAM SCOTUS (d. 1180), theological writer, sometimes called Adam Anglicus or Anglo-Scotus, was born in the south of Scotland in the first half of the 12th century. About 1150 he was a Premonstratensian canon at St Andrews, and some twenty years later abbot and bishop of Candida Casa (Whithorn) in Galloway. He gained a European reputation for his writings, which are of mystico-ascetic type, and include an account of the Premonstratensian order, a collection of festival sermons, and a Soliloquia de instructione discipuli, formerly attributed to his contemporary, Adam of St Victor.

ADAMSON, PATRICK (1537--1592), Scottish divine, archbishop of St Andrews, was born at Perth. He studied philosophy, and took the degree of M.A. at St Andrews. After being minister of Ceres in Fife for three years, in 1566 he set out for Paris as tutor to the eldest son of Sir James Macgill, the clerk-general. In June of the same year he wrote a Latin poem on the birth of the young prince James, whom he described as serenissimus princeps of France and England. The French court was offended, and he was confined for six months. He was released only through the intercession of Queen Mary of Scotland and some of the principal nobility, and retired with his pupil to Bourges. He was in this city at the time of the massacre of St Bartholomew at Paris, and lived concealed for seven months in a public-house, the aged master of which, in reward for his charity to a heretic, was thrown from the roof. While in this ``Sepulchre,', he wrote his Latin poetical version of the book of Job, and his tragedy of Herod in the same language. In 1572 or 1573 he returned to Scotland, and became minister of Paisley. In 1575 he was appointed by the General Assembly one of the commissioners to settle the jurisdiction and policy of the church; and the following year he was named, with David Lindsay, to report their proceedings to the earl of Morton, then regent. In 1576 his appointment as archbishop of St Andrews gave rise to a protracted conflict with the Presbyterian party in the Assembly. He had previously published a catechism in Latin verse dedicated to the king, a work highly approved even by his opponents, and also a Latin translation of the Scottish Confession of Faith. In 1578 he submitted himself to the General Assembly, which procured him peace for a little time, but next year fresh accusations were brought against him. He took refuge in St Andrews Castle, where ``a wise woman,'' Alison Pearson, who was ultimately burned for witchcraft, cured him of a serious illness. In 1583 he went as James's ambassador to the court of Elizabeth, and is said to have behaved rather badly. On his return he took strong parliamentary measures against Presbyterians, and consequently, at a provincial synod held at St Andrews in April 1586, he was accused of heresy and excommunicated, but at the next General Assembly the sentence was remitted as illegal. In 1587 and 1588, however, fresh accusations were brought against him, and he was again excommunicated, though afterwards on the inducement of his old opponent, Andrew Melville, the sentence was again remitted. Meanwhile he had published the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and the book of Revelation in Latin verse, which he dedicated to the king, complaining of his hard usage. But James was unmoved by his application, and granted the revenue of his see to the duke of Lennox. For the rest of his life Adamson was supported by charity; he died in 1592. His recantation of Episcopacy (1590) is probably spurious. Adamson was a man of many gifts, learned and eloquent, but with grave defects of character. His collected works, prefaced by a fulsome panegyric, in the course of which it is said that ``he was a miracle of nature, and rather seemed to be the immediate production of God Almighty than born of a woman,'' were produced by his son-in-law, Thomas Wilson, in 1619.

ADAMSON, ROBERT (1852-1902), Scottish philosopher, was born in Edinburgh on the 19th of January 1852. His father was a solicitor, and his mother was the daughter of Matthew Buist, factor to Lord Haddington. In 1855 Mrs Adamson was left a widow with small means, and devoted herself entirely to the education of her six children. Of these, Robert was successful from the first. At the end of his school career he entered the university of Edinburgh at the age of fourteen, and four years later graduated with first-class honours in mental philosophy, with prizes in every department of the faculty of Arts. He completed his university successes by winning the Tyndall-Bruce scholarship, the Hamilton fellowship (1872), the Ferguson scholarship (1872) and the Shaw fellowship (1873). After a short residence at Heidelberg (1871), where he began his study of German philosophy, he returned to Edinburgh as assistant first to Henry Calderwood and later to A. Campbell Fraser; he joined the staff of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (9th ed.) (1874) and studied widely in the Advocates' Library. In 1876 he came to England as successor to W. S. Jevons in the chair of logic and philosophy, at Owens College, Manchester. In 1883 he received the honorary degree of LL.D. In 1893 he went to Aberdeen, and finally in 1895 to the chair of logic at Glasgow, which he held till his death on the 5th of February 1902. His wife, Margaret Duncan, the daughter of a Manchester merchant, was a woman of kindred tastes, and their union was entirely happy.

It is matter for regret to the student that Adamson's active labours in the lecture room precluded him from systematic production. His writings consisted of short articles, of which many appeared in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (9th ed.) and in Mind, a volume on Kant and another on Fichte. At the time of his death he was writing a History of Psychology, and had promised a work on Kant and the Modern Naturalists. Both in his life and in his writings he was remarkable for impartiality. It was his peculiar virtue that he could quote his opponents without warping their meaning. From this point of view he would have been perhaps the first historian of philosophy of his time, had his professional labours been less exacting. Except during the first few years at Manchester, he delivered his lectures without manuscripts. In 1903, under the title The Development of Modern Philosophy and Other Essays, his more important lectures were published with a short biographical introduction by Prof. W. R. Sorley of Cambridge University (see Mind, xiii. 1904, p. 73 foll.). Most of the matter is taken verbatim from the note-book of one of his students. Under the same editorship there appeared, three years later, his Development of Greek Philosophy. In addition to his professional work, he did much administrative work for Victoria University and the university of Glasgow. In the organization of Victoria University he took a foremost part, and, as chairman of the Board of Studies at Owens College, he presided over the general academical board of the Victoria University. At Glasgow he was soon elected one of the representatives on the court, and to him were due in large measure the extension of the academical session and the improved equipment of the university.

Throughout his lectures, Adamson pursued the critical and historical method without formulating a constructive theory of his own. He felt that any philosophical advance must be based on the Kantian methods. It was his habit to make straight for the ultimate issue, disregarding half-truths and declining compromise. He left a hypothesis to be worked out by others; this done, he would criticize with all the rigour of logic, and with a profound distrust of imagination, metaphor and the attitude known as the will-to-believe. As he grew older his metaphysical optimism waned. He felt that the increase of knowledge must come in the domains of physical science. But this empirical tendency as regards science never modified his metaphysical outlook. He has been called Kantian and Neo-Kantian, Realist and Idealist (by himself, for he held that appearance and reality are co-extensive and coincident). At the same time, in his criticism of other views he was almost typical of Hegelian idealism. All processes of reasoning or judgment (i.e. all units of thought) are (1) analysable only by abstraction, and (2) are compound of deduction and induction, i.e. rational and empirical. An illustration of his empirical tendency is found in his attitude to the Absolute and the Self. The ``Absolute'' doctrines he regarded as a mere disguise of failure, a dishonest attempt to clothe ignorance in the pretentious garb of mystery. The Self as a primary, determining entity, he would not therefore admit. He represented an empiricism which, so far from refuting, was actually based on, idealism, and yet was alert to expose the fallacies of a particular idealist construction (see his essay in Ethical Democracy, edited by Dr Stanton Coit).

ADAM'S PEAK, a mountain in Ceylon, about 45 miles E. from Colombo, in N. lat. 6 deg. 55', E. long. 80 deg. 30'. It rises steeply to a height of 7352 feet, and commands a magnificent prospect. Its conical summit terminates in an oblong platform, 74 ft. by 24, on which there is a hollow, resembling the form of a human foot, 5 ft. 4 in. by 2 ft. 6 in.; and this has been consecrated as the footprint of Buddha. The margin of this supposed footprint is ornamented with gems, and a wooden canopy protects it from the weather. It is held in high veneration by the Sinhalese, and numerous pilgrims ascend to the sacred spot, where a priest resides to receive their offerings and bless them on their departure. By the Mahommedans the impression is regarded as that of the foot of Adam, who here, according to their tradition, fulfilled a penance of one thousand years; while the Hindus claim it as that of their god Siva.