Abstract
THE greater part of this book consists of réchauffées articles from Good Words and other publications. At the present day there is a large public curious to know biographical details, so no doubt the book will find many appreciative readers. The astronomers whose lives are portrayed are Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Flamsteed, Halley, Bradley, William and John Herschel, Laplace, Brinkley, the Earl of Rosse, Airy, Hamilton, Le Verrier, and Adams. It need hardly be said that the serious student of astronomy will find little in this book not already familiar to him; the volume is intended for the popular mind, and therefore much of it is small talk of the kind in which the general public revels. When the lives of eighteen astronomers are described in a volume of less than four hundred pages, as they are in this book, it is needless to say that only a few of the features characteristic of each can be presented. Sir Robert Ball has, however, selected the chief features in the lives and works of the great men who form his subjects, and his sketches, though verbose in parts, bring to light a few new facts in which astronomers generally will be interested. The book contains numerous illustrations, many of them new. The illustrations chiefly represent the astronomers described, and their houses, observatories, and instruments. We cannot understand, however, why some of them are in the book at all; for instance, with the sketch of the Earl of Rosse we find pictures of Birr Castle; The Mall, Parsonstown; and the Roman Catholic Church at Parsonstown. The connection of these views with “Great Astronomers” is much less reasonable than that between cats and clover.
Great Astronomers.
By Sir Robert S. Ball Pp. 372. (London: Isbister and Co., 1895.)
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Great Astronomers. Nature 53, 29 (1895). https://doi.org/10.1038/053029b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/053029b0