291 
REVIEWS. 
OTHER, WORLDS THAN OURS.* 
I T seems as if each department of science had its own especial epoch or 
period, when, by reason of its popularity, or the importance of the dis- 
coveries revealed by those who belong to it, it becomes more prominent 
than usual. Just in such an epoch does astronomy appear to be at the pre- 
sent time. The great improvements in telescopic construction, the compara- 
tive cheapness of instruments with which original research can be conducted, 
the wonderful applications of spectroscopy and photography to astronomical 
enquiries, all have helped to render the study of the heavens, not only 
a pursuit open to thousands who hitherto never looked at a star, but have 
also by the revelation of some of the most wonderful phenomena in nature, 
given astronomy an importance which it hardly had before. 
The time, therefore, had come when a treatise embodying the results of 
later researches, and giving, as it were, a bird’s-eye view of our knowledge 
of the celestial bodies, as it now exists, was required ; and such a treatise 
Messrs. Longmans have given us in the excellent volume now under notice. 
Mr. Proctor — who is at once a teacher, an investigator, and a writer — com- 
bines the three qualities essential to the construction of such a work as that 
to which we have alluded, and he has brought these into full and successful 
operation in his account of the modern heavens, if we may use the expres- 
sion. His book is not a treatise on astronomy j it is more a work which, in 
the fashion of Herschel’s Lectures on Scientific Subjects, deals fully, and yet 
with remarkable clearness, with a number of scientific problems, and which 
is addressed to the man of general education, whether he be an astronomer 
or not. But as the author treats of nearly all the astronomical questions 
which come within the range of the ordinary text-book, the person who 
carefully reads Other Worlds than Ours will learn nearly all that the scien- 
tific star-gazer has got to tell. 
"When we tell our readers that Mr. Proctor has chapters on the Earth, the 
Sun, the inferior planets, on Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, the Moon, 
meteors, and comets, the stars, and the nebulse, they will excuse our at- 
* “Other Worlds than Ours: the Plurality of Worlds, studied under the 
light of recent scientific researches.” By Richard A. Proctor, B.A.,F.R.A.S. 
London : Longmans, 1870. 
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