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PUBLISHERS' NOTE

QB15
F6

ASTRONOMY
LIBRARY

A HISTORY OF THE SCIENCES has been planned to present for the information of the general public a historic record of the great divisions of science. Each volume is the work of a writer who is accepted as an authority on his own subject-matter. The books are not to be considered as primers, but present thoroughly digested information on the relations borne by each great division of science to the changes in human ideas and to the intellectual development of mankind. The monographs explain how the principal scientific discoveries have been arrived at and the names of the workers to whom such discoveries are due.

The books will comprise each about 200 pages. Each volume will contain from 12 to 16 illustrations, including portraits of the discoverers and explanatory views and diagrams. Each volume contains also a concise but comprehensive bibliography of the subject-matter. following volumes will be issued during the course of the autumn of 1909.

The History of Astronomy.

The

By GEORGE FORBES, M.A., F.R.S., M. Inst. C.E.; author of The Transit of Venus, etc.

M577096

The History of Chemistry: Vol. I. circa 2000 B.C. to 1850 A.D. Vol. II. 1850 A.D. to date. By SIR EDWARD THORPE, C.B., LL.D., F.R.S., Director of the Government Laboratories, London; Professor-elect and Director of the Chemical Laboratories of the Imperial College of Science and Technology; author of A Dictionary of Applied Chemistry.

To be followed by:

The History of Geography.

By Dr. JOHN SCOTT KELTIE, F.R.G.S., F.S.S., F.S.A., Hon. Mem. Geographical Societies of Paris, Berlin, Rome, Brussels, Amsterdam, Geneva, etc.; author of Report on Geographical Education, Applied Geography. The History of Geology.

By HORACE B. WOODWARD, F.R.S., F.G.S., Assistant-Director of Geological Survey of England and Wales; author of The Geology of England and Wales, etc.

The History of Anthropology.

By A. C. HADDON, M.A., Sc.D., F.R.S., Lecturer in Ethnology, Cambridge and London; author of Study of Man, Magic and Fetishism, etc.

The History of Old Testament Criticism. By ARCHIBALD DUFF, Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Theology in the United

College, Bradford; author of Theology and
Ethics of the Hebrews, Modern Old Testament
Theology, etc.

The History of New Testament Criticism.
By F. C. CONYBEARE, M.A., late Fellow and
Praelector of Univ. Coll., Oxford; Fellow
of the British Academy; Doctor of Theol-
ogy, honoris causa, of Giessen; Officer d'
Academie; author of Old Armenian Texts of
Revelation, etc.

Further volumes are in plan on the following subjects:

Mathematics and Mechanics.

Molecular Physics, Heat, Life, and Electricity. Human Physiology, Embryology, and Heredity. Acoustics, Harmonics, and the Physiology of Hearing, together with Optics Chromatics, and Physiology of Seeing.

Psychology, Analytic, Comparative, and Experimental.

Sociology and Economics.

Ethics.

Comparative Philology.

Criticism, Historical Research, and Legends. Comparative Mythology and the Science of Religions.

The Criticism of Ecclesiastical Institutions.

Culture, Moral and Intellectual, as Reflected in Imaginative Literature and in the Fine Arts.

Logic.

Philosophy.
Education.

PREFACE

AN

N attempt has been made in these pages to trace the evolution of intellectual thought in the progress of astronomical discovery, and, by recognising the different points of view of the different ages, to give due credit even to the ancients. No one can expect, in a history of astronomy of limited size, to find a treatise on "practical" or on "theoretical astronomy," nor a complete "descriptive astronomy," and still less a book on "speculative astronomy." Something of each of these is essential, however, for tracing the progress of thought and knowledge which it is the object of this History to describe.

The progress of human knowledge is measured by the increased habit of looking at facts from new points of view, as much as by the accumulation of facts. The mental capacity of one age does not seem to differ from that of other ages; but it is the imagination of new points of view that gives a wider scope to that capacity. And this is cumulative, and therefore progressive. Aristotle viewed the solar system as a geometrical problem; Kepler and Newton converted the point of view into a dynamical one. Aristotle's mental capacity to understand the meaning of facts or to

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