382 Notices respecting New Books. 



mica being too numerous an impression, has been tendered about 

 the streets at Is. 6d. each. The like I say of Mr. Barrow's 

 Euclid. Mr. Sutton and myself, as Mr. Marke well knows, 

 have bought divers of them at Is. a book, in quires." There 

 is very little about the calculators of logarithms or their works 

 in the Macclesfield collection ; but it appears that in 1673 

 Flam steed borrowed a copy of Vlacq's Trigonometria Artificialis 

 from Collins. In a letter to Thomas Lydyat (July 11, 1623) 

 printed in the Letters of the Historical Society of Science, 

 Briggs speaks of being engaged on his logarithms ; but it is 

 sufficiently evident from other considerations that he must have 

 been so employed at the time. 



Birch, 4407, contains a MS. entitled " Imitatio Nepeirea. Sive 

 Applicatio omnium (fere) regularum suis Logarithmis pertinen- 

 tium ad Logarithmos M ri Brigges. Ex propria* descriptione 

 sui Canonis Mirifici. Impressa Edinburgi Anno 1614." The 

 tract, which is not in Briggs's handwriting, I should imagine, 

 from internal evidence (though I have made no very careful 

 examination of its contents), to have been written about 1623. 

 It seems to be (as its name implies) a sort of parody, with 

 Briggian logarithms, of Napier's Canon Mirificus ; but does not 

 appear to possess any particular value or interest. 



April 16, 1873. 



XLIX. Notices respecting New Books. 



Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes. By the Rev. T. "W. Webb. 



London: Longmans. 

 Report presented to the Board of Visitors of the Royal Observatory, 



Edinburgh. By C. Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal for Scotland. 



THE appearance of a third edition of the valuable epitome of 

 practical amateur astronomy first mentioned is a strong evidence 

 of the healthy condition of the science, considered apart from the 

 ordinary work of established observatories. It is now some thirty 

 years since an impetus was given to the labours of the amateur by 

 the publication of the late Admiral Smyth's ' Celestial Cycle ;' and 

 there can be no doubt that the progress made in a knowledge of 

 double and binary stars between its publication and the year 1859 

 is mainly attributable to the ' Bedford Catalogue,' which formed the 

 second part of the ' Cycle,' and for which the author received the 

 gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. Originally dedi- 

 cated to Admiral Smyth, the work which forms the subject of this 

 notice, in addition to most valuable mf ormation relative to the sun, 

 planets, and comets, embodies in a condensed form the most im- 

 portant characteristics of double stars, clusters, and nebulae ; and 

 we have only to refer to the edition which has just appeared to 



* The word which I take to be propria is a correction in a later hand 

 of that originally written, which was perhaps ejus. 



