'682 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. IX. No. 2S8. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS. 

 A Short History of Astronomy. By Arthue 



Berry. New York, Charles Scribner's 



Sons. 1899. Pp. xxi + 440. Price, $1.50. 



Astronomy is a science whose historj' may be 

 said to have been over-exploited. In French 

 there are the great works of Delambre, La 

 Place and Bailly, Biot and Tannery ; in Ger- 

 man, those of Jahn and Wolf, Epping and 

 Strassmayer ; and in English, mainly Grant's 

 classic work, which won him the gold medal of 

 the Royal Astronomical Society, Sir George 

 Lewis's Astronomy of the Ancients, and Miss 

 Gierke's admirable, accurate and delightfully 

 readable history of astronomy during the 19th 

 century, not to mention other and more recent 

 works by Sir Norman Lockyer. 



Clearly there could have been no clamor for 

 a, new, history when Mr. Berry, an assistant 

 tutor at Cambridge, England, undertook his 

 task ; if demand there was, it was rather the 

 exigency of the 'University Series.' Had its 

 volumes been twice their present size, and had 

 Mr. Berry taken time to familiarize himself with 

 originals, instead of compiling ' largely from 

 second-hand sources,' as he has to admit, his 

 book would still have been but a ' Short His- 

 tory ' ; but he might well have achieved a con- 

 tribution of permanent worth, for he is by 

 no means deficient in aptitude for the task. 

 However, his confessed lack of knowledge of 

 and symjjathy for the observational side of the 

 science has induced him to erect his edifice on 

 insufficient foundations, so that homogeneity of 

 structure is baldly impossible. 



Although the illustrations number 120, there 

 is no picture of a telescope save one a hundred 

 years old and more ; no statement of the prin- 

 ciple of the achromatic telescope, without which 

 the astronomy of to-day would for the most 

 part have been non-existent ; uo mention of 

 Dollond, its acknowledged inventor, nor of the 

 greatest builders of telescopes — Grubb, the 

 Henry Brothers, Steinheil — not even the Clarks. 

 Spectroscopes, the very staff of the new as- 

 tronomy, are singularly neglected. With this 

 author, compression has been insistent, but it 

 has largely been gained by deliberate and not 

 very well considered exclusion. His work 



thus produces an impression of being fragmen- 

 tary rather than comprehensive. 



Firstly, it seems unnecessary to have devoted 

 an initial twenty pages to sheer elements, 

 found in, and only appropriate to, a mere text- 

 book of secondary grade. The most ancient 

 astronomy is dismissed in rather summary 

 fashion, as was necessary. Archaic and ele- 

 mentary mathematical conceptions are well 

 sketched, and the frequent biographic notes 

 afford a much needed enlivening of the text, 

 although of slender astronomical significance. 



Mr. Berry perpetuates the old-time error re- 

 garding annular eclipses, by a diagram showing 

 an impossibly large sun centrally obscured by 

 an impossibly small moon, still further darkened 

 by impossible black spots on its surface (page 

 59). The advances of Hipparchus and Ptolemy 

 are excellently narrated. With the life and 

 work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Des- 

 cartes is concluded the first half of the vol- 

 ume. 



Naturally, the lives and works of Newton 

 and the Herschels receive the fullest attention ; 

 but Mr. Berry fails to state the law of univer- 

 sal gravitation quite correctly, its most general 

 form involving the product of the masses of 

 bodies concerned, not their sum (page 228). 

 And it would be rather difficult to defend this . 

 book against the charge of insularity, for the 

 English astronomers are accorded vastly more 

 consideration than the Continental, let alone 

 Americans, who are conspicuously passed over. 

 We have only scanty space for a catalogue of 

 especial omissions ; but may instance, among 

 Germans, the classic work of Schmidt and Lohr- 

 mann on the moon, of Briinnow and C. A. F. 

 Peters on stellar distances and the constants of 

 astronomy, of Chladni upon meteors, of Kaiser 

 upon the planets, of Heis upon meteors and 

 stellar magnitudes, of D'Arrest and Lamont 

 upon the nebulce, of Oppolzer upon eclipses, of 

 Auwers upon stellar catalogues and other de- 

 partments of exact astronomy, and of Spoerer 

 upon the sun, his remarkable ' law of spot 

 zones ' being nowhere alluded to. For France 

 and Italy the omissions are less serious, though 

 Gassendi, De 1' Isle, Pingre, Lemonnier, Mon- 

 tucla, Mechaiu, Oriani, Pons, Foucault and 

 Deslandres were much better included than 



