Amongst the many younger men who were attracted and stimulated by intercourse with him was Johann Franz Encke. But while Olbers became a mathematician because he was an astronomer, Encke became an astronomer because he was a mathematician. A born geometer, he was naturally sent to Göttingen and placed under the tuition of Gauss. But geometers are men; and the contagion of patriotic fervour which swept over Germany after the battle of Leipsic did not spare Gauss's promising pupil. He took up arms in the Hanseatic Legion, and marched and fought until the oppressor of his country was safely ensconced behind the ocean-walls of St. Helena. In the course of his campaigning he met Lindenau, the militant director of the Seeberg Observatory, and by his influence was appointed his assistant, and eventually, in 1822, became his successor. Thence he was promoted in 1825 to Berlin, where he superintended the building of the new observatory, so actively promoted by Humboldt, and remained at its head until within some eighteen months of his death in August, 1865.
On the 26th of November, 1818, Pons of Marseilles discovered a comet, whose inconspicuous appearance gave little promise of its becoming one of the most interesting objects in our system. Encke at once took the calculation of its elements in hand, and brought out the unexpected result that it revolved round the sun in a period of about 3-1/3 years.[242] He, moreover, detected its identity with comets seen by Méchain in 1786, by Caroline Herschel in 1795, by Pons, Huth, and Bouvard in 1805, and after six laborious weeks of research into the disturbances experienced by it from the planets during the entire interval since its first ascertained appearance, he fixed May 24, 1822, as the date of its next return to perihelion. Although on that occasion, owing to the position of the earth, invisible in the northern hemisphere, Sir Thomas Brisbane's observatory at Paramatta was fortunately ready equipped for its recapture, which Rümker effected quite close to the spot indicated by Encke's ephemeris.
The importance of this event can be better understood when it is remembered that it was only the second instance of the recognised return of a comet (that of Halley's, sixty-three years previously, having, as already stated, been the first); and that it, moreover, established the existence of a new class of celestial objects, somewhat loosely distinguished as "comets of short period." These bodies (of which about thirty have been found to circulate within the orbit of Saturn) are remarkable as showing certain planetary affinities in the manners of their motions not at all perceptible in the wider travelling members of their order. They revolve, without exception, in the same direction as the planets--from west to east; they exhibit a marked tendency to conform to the zodiacal track which limits planetary excursions north and south; and their paths round the sun, although much more eccentric than the approximately circular planetary orbits, are far less so than the extravagantly long ellipses in which comets comparatively untrained (as it were) in the habits of the solar system ordinarily perform their revolutions.