Contrihuiion of Astrono7ny to General Culture 355 



translation into Arabic ; inaugurating a geodetic survey in Meso- 

 potamia; and founding an active observatory^ at Bagdad. Alba- 

 tegnius, a prince of Syria, ruler of Damascus, of slightly later date, 

 was a zealous observer, a skilled computer, and introduced im- 

 provements in trigonometric methods. Three hundred years 

 later the Mongolian prince, Ilek Khan, founded an observatory 

 in Persia, in which useful observations of the planets were made 

 and the positions of the stars were catalogued. Simultaneously, 

 in Spain, Alfonso X, King of Castile, is furthering the advance- 

 ment of astronomy, and causes the construction of the so-called 

 Alphonsine tables of the planetary motions. In the fifteenth 

 century, it is a Tartar prince and grandson of Tamerlane, Ulugh 

 Begh, who, a skilled observer, erects a splendidly equipped obser- 

 vatory at Samarcand and catalogues the stars after the lapse of 

 nearly sixteen centuries since Hipparchus. It is perfectly clear 

 that this distinction and interest accorded to astronomy by men 

 of such political and social rank must have greatly tended to the 

 development of public interest in science, with a consequent 

 general culture of the people of the times. 



With the advent of Copernicus, (1473-1543), what an immense 

 expansion of mind was prepared for the intellectual world by the 

 substitution of the true heliocentric system for the complicated 

 makeshifts of Ptolemy! Not until after his death did his views 

 receive much attention, but the opposition they aroused in clerical 

 quarters doubless greatly helped to diffuse them. And now came 

 the great explorations of Columbus and his fellow pioneers on 

 trackless oceans. Indeed, astronomy had largely contributed to 

 the general culture of the times, to the grand awakening, the 

 renaissance. Evidence was accumulating to show that compara- 

 tively simple laws were governing the complex motions of planets. 

 The careful observations by Tycho and the great generalizations 

 of Kepler were in the logical order of the day. Consider the expan- 

 sion of ideas, the increase of general culture, which followed the 

 discoveries made by Galileo, as soon as he pointed his perfected 

 telescope toward the moon, the sun, and planets; the existence 

 on the moon of mountains and topography of the general sort of 

 that of the earth; the spots on the ecclesiastically immaculate 

 sun, its rotation on its axis in twenty-five days; the moons of Jupi- 

 ter and their rapid revolution; the m3^sterious appendage of Saturn 

 not at first discerned as a ring. 



