Pioneers of Science

Abstract

THIS book consists of eighteen lectures on the history and progress of astronomy, which were delivered by Dr. Lodge in 1887. “The lectures having been found interesting,” he thought it “natural to write them out in full and publish,” and, although this can scarcely be considered a sufficient excuse, the intrinsic merits of the work are abundant justification for its existence. In Part I., “From Dusk to Daylight,” the progress of astronomy from Copernicus to Newton is traced in a series of vivid pictures of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton; while Part II., “A Couple of Centuries' Progress,” brings the history of gravitational astronomy from Newton down to the present time. In these latter lectures Roemer and Bradley are associated with the velocity of light and aberration; Legrange and Laplace with the solar system and the nebular hypothesis; Herschel with the motion of “fixed” stars; Bessel with the distances of stars Adams and Leverrier with the discovery of Neptune; and Lord Kelvin and George H. Darwin with tides. Dr. Lodge has been able, by judiciously combining clear statements of scientific facts and laws with interesting personal details, to give his lectures all the charm of a romance. The book is an admirable introduction to the study of astronomy, and no better gift for a beginner could well be chosen; while to those to whom many of its details are already familiar, the picturesque clearness with which they are presented will make their knowledge more real and more complete. The standard of excellence maintained in the lectures makes distinction difficult and invidious, or we would distinguish the lectures on Newton and those on tides as models of what such popular scientific expositions should be. The book is copiously, and, on the whole, well illustrated, but some of the illustrations—notably those of clusters and nebulæ—are very familiar and somewhat out of date. A curious mistake occurs on page 201, where a well-known drawing of a comet appears as an “old drawing of the Andro meda nebula.” The illustration on page 326, showing the paths of Uranus and Neptune and their relative positions from 1781 to 184o, and professing “to illustrate the direction of their mutual perturbing forces,” is partly misleading; but in introducing this Dr. Lodge has erred in good company, for the diagram, originally due to Dr. Houghton, appears in many of our recent astronomical text-books.

Pioneers of Science.

By Oliver Lodge (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1893.)

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