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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: POPULAR ASTRONOMY. PART I. ?THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD HISTORICALLY DEVELOPED. INTRODUCTION. A8tronomy is the most ancient of the physical sciences, being distinguished among them by its slow and progressive development from the earliest ages until the present time. In no other science has each generation which advanced it been so much indebted to its predecessors for both the facts and the ideas necessary to make the advance. The conception of a globular and moving earth pursuing her course through the celestial spaces among her sister planets, which we see as stars, is one to the entire evolution of which no one mind and no one age can lay claim. It was the result of a gradual process of education, of which the subject was not an individual, but the human race. The great astronomers of all ages have built upon foundations laid by their predecessors; and when we attempt to search ont the first founder, we find ourselves lost in the mists of antiquity. The theory of universal gravitation was founded by Newton upon the laws of Kepler, the observations and measurements of his French contemporaries, and the geometry of Apollonius. Kepler used as his material the observations of Tycho Brahe, and built upon the theory of Copernicus. When we seek the origin of the instruments used by Tycho, we soon find onrselves amongthe mediaeval Arabs. The discovery of the true system of the world by Copernicus was only possible by a careful study of the laws of apparent motion of the planets as expressed in the epicycles of Ptolemy and Hipparchus. Indeed, the more carefully one studies the great work of Copernicus, the more surprised he will be to find how completely Ptolemy furnished him both ideas and material. If we seek the teachers and predecessors of Hipparchus, we find only the shadowy ...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217032339 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217032338 |
| Weight | 1.72 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 1.19 In |
| List Price | $26.06 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 536 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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