10 CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON. 



Similarly, it is now equally plain that the ideas of the chemist 

 Berthollet and the mathematician Fourier who, about a century 

 ago, stood with Napoleon before the pjTamids while the centuries 

 looked down upon them, have proved incomparably more worthy 

 of preservation and development than the ideas of that autocrat. 

 He and his statecraft perished, but the savants of his day, con- 

 spicuously typified by Lagrange, Laplace, and Lavoisier, have 

 won increasing and world-wide regard with the lapse of time. 



It appears not inappropriate, therefore, in line with these 

 reflections, to cite here among the noteworthy events of the year 

 in the history of the Institution the publication of a new (and 

 probably final) edition of the Catalogue of Stars of Ulugh Beg, 

 an astronomer of the fifteenth century who 'Svas the most famous 

 as he was the last conspicuous representative of Arabian astron- 

 omy." He was the grandson of Tamerlane, but quite unlike 

 this warrior ancestor he enjo3^s the distinction of having estab- 

 lished an observatory^ near Samarkand (about A. D. 1420) and 

 having founded his catalogue of stellar positions on original obser- 

 vations. The first edition, or manuscript account, of his work 

 appeared about 1437, under the title Zij Ulugh Beg. It consists 

 of an introductorj^ section in foiu* parts or chapters, followed by 

 some thirty" tables essential to astronomical calculations and by 

 the catalogue of stellar positions. The table of contents of the 

 work, republished in translation in the new edition, is profoundly 

 instructive in the light it throws on the evolution of astronomical 

 theor}^ and astronomical practice; while peculiar humanistic 

 interest should be aroused by the title of the fourth chapter, 

 "Horoscopes and Nativities," since this indicates among other 

 things that the distinguished author did not appreciate as keenly 

 as do his successors the necessity of corrections for personal 

 equation and for anthropocentric parallax. 



This work stands in sequence with, and is the next most impor- 

 tant work after, the Almagest of Ptolemy, an edition of which 

 was published by the Institution a j^ear ago; and it is a fortunate 

 circumstance that the new edition of Ulugh Beg, like the edition 

 of the Almagest just referred to, has been issued under the editor- 

 ship of Mr. Edward Ball Knobel, Treasurer and past President 

 of the Royal Astronomical Society of London. Mr. Knobel 

 began investigation of the manuscripts of Ulugh Beg in 1879. 

 His collaborator and co-author in the case of the Almagest, Dr. 



