ASTRONOMY IN SHAKESPEARE'S TIME 

 AND IN OURS 



By C. G. Abbot 

 Secretary, Smithsonian Institution 



[With 6 plates] 



About 50 years ago Dr. S. P. Langley, third secretary of the 

 Smithsonian Institution, wrote a charming book called The New 

 Astronomy. He pointed out that from the earliest times almost 

 until his own, astronomy had been restricted to the study of the posi- 

 tions and motions of the heavenly bodies. Now the inquiry had be- 

 come more and more : What are members of the heavenly host in 

 chemical and physical constitution? Both branches of astronomy 

 have made astonishing progress since Langley wrote, as we shall 

 see in contrasting astronomy's present status with that of Shakes- 

 peare's time. What I wish to emphasize by referring to Langley's 

 book is that nothing that depends on the use of the spectroscope or 

 of photography was known to the astronomers of Galileo's and 

 Shakespeare's generation. And we may well estimate that three- 

 fourths of our present knowledge of the subject depends on photo- 

 graphic and spectroscopic observations. 



Astronomy is the distinguished child of that gypsy like mother, 

 astrology. In Babylonia, the sun, moon, and planets were gods and 

 goddesses. Fortunate and unfortunate public events were naturally 

 associated with the intervention of the gods, and hence with the 

 aspect of the heavenly bodies. It therefore became a priestly duty 

 to watch the heavens for portents. In this way astrology was born, 

 flourished, and gave birth to astronomy. During at least 2,000 years 

 there grew up a great body of knowledge of the motions of the sun, 

 moon, planets, and stars, but until the seventeenth century of our era 

 there were no telescopes or accurate clocks by which observations 

 exact enough to prove sound theory could be made. 



The poet Shakespeare lived at the very beginning of a new astro- 

 nomical epoch, which we may call the first age of the telescope, last- 

 ing through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. 

 Copernicus, indeed, had published his great work on the motions of 



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