The story of the sun, moon, and stars

PROFESSOR OF ASTRONOMY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

The pages of this volume on a great subject were submitted to my criticism while passing through the press, with a request from a friend that I would make any suggestions which might occur to me for its improvement. Naturally, such a request was entertained, in the first instance, with hesitation and misgiving. But after a rapid perusal of the first sheet, I found my interest awakened, and then gradually secured; for the book seemed to me to possess certain features of no ordinary character, and, in my judgment, held out the promise of supplying an undoubted want, thus enabling me to answer a question which I have been often asked, and which had as often puzzled me, to the effect, “Can you tell me of any book on astronomy suited to beginners?” I think just such a book is here presented to the reader; for the tale of the stellar universe is therein told with great simplicity, and perhaps with sufficient completeness, in an earnest and pleasant style, equally free, I think, from inaccuracy or unpardonable exaggeration. We have here the outlines of elementary astronomy, not merely detailed without mathematics, but to a very great extent expressed in untechnical language. Success in such an attempt I regard as a considerable feat, and one of much practical utility.

For the science of astronomy is essentially a science of great magnitude and great difficulty. From the time of Hipparchus, some century and a half before the Christian era, down to the present day, the cultivation of astronomy has severely taxed the minds of a succession of men endowed with the rarest genius. The facts and the truths of the science thus secured have been of very slow accretion; but like all other truths, when once secured and thoroughly understood, they are found to admit of very simple verbal expression, and to lie well within the general comprehension, and, I may safely add, within the sympathies of all educated men and women.

Thus the great astronomers, the original discoverers of the last twenty centuries, have labored, each in his separate field of the vast universe of nature, and other men, endowed with other gifts, have entered on their labors, and by systematizing, correlating, and simplifying the expression of their results, have brought the whole within the grasp of cultivated men engaged in other branches of the varied pursuits of our complicated life. It is in this sort of order that the amelioration and civilization of mankind have proceeded, and at the present moment are, I hope and believe, rapidly proceeding.

It was, I suspect, under this point of view, though half unconsciously so, that my attention was arrested by the book now presented to the reader; for we have here many of the chief results of the laborious researches of such men as Ptolemy, Kepler, Newton, Herschel, Fraunhofer, Janssen, Lockyer, Schiaparelli, and others--no matter where accumulated or by whom recorded--filtered through the mind of a thoughtful and cultured lady, and here presented to other minds in the very forms wherein they have been assimilated and pictured in her own. And these forms and pictures are true. It is in this way that the intellectual “protoplasm” of the human mind is fostered and practically disseminated.

And, then, there is still another point of view from which this general dissemination of great truths in a simple style assumes an aspect of practical importance. I allude to the influences of this process on the imaginative or poetic side of our complex nature.

Wordsworth, in one of his prefaces, has stated so clearly the truth on this subject that I can not do better than give his words. “If the time should ever come,” he says, “when what is now science becomes familiarized to men, then the remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, the mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed. He will be ready to follow the steps of the man of science; he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself. The poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.”

It is for reasons such as here stated that I heartily commend this book to the attention of those who take an interest in the advancement of the intellectual progress and culture of society. The story of the Kosmos is told by the authoress in her own language and after her own method. I believe, as I have said, the story is correct.

OXFORD UNIVERSITY.

CONTENTS.