Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variationsin hyphenation has been standardised but all other spelling andpunctuation remains unchanged.
Ditto marks, in the table of contents and illustrations, have beenreplaced by the text. Blank pages and their page numbers have beenomitted.
The cover was created by the transcriber and is placed in the publicdomain.
THE UNIVERSITY SERIES
A Short History
of
Astronomy
By ARTHUR BERRY, M.A.
FELLOW AND ASSISTANT TUTOR OF KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE;
FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1899
v
PREFACE.
I have tried to give in this book an outline of the historyof astronomy from the earliest historical times to the presentday, and to present it in a form which shall be intelligibleto a reader who has no special knowledge of either astronomyor mathematics, and has only an ordinary educated person’spower of following scientific reasoning.
In order to accomplish my object within the limits ofone small volume it has been necessary to pay the strictestattention to compression; this has been effected to someextent by the omission of all but the scantiest treatmentof several branches of the subject which would figureprominently in a book written on a different plan or ona different scale. I have deliberately abstained from givingany connected account of the astronomy of the Egyptians,Chaldaeans, Chinese, and others to whom the early developmentof astronomy is usually attributed. On the onehand, it does not appear to me possible to form an independentopinion on the subject without a first-handknowledge of the documents and inscriptions from whichour information is derived; and on the other, the variousOriental scholars who have this knowledge still differ sowidely from one another in the interpretations that theygive that it appears premature to embody their results invithe dogmatic form of a textbook. It has also seemedadvisable to lighten the book by omitting—except in a veryfew simple and important cases—all accounts of astronomicalinstruments; I do not remember ever to havederived any pleasure or profit from a written descriptionof a scientific instrument before seeing the instrumentitself, or one very similar to it, and I have abstainedfrom attempting to give to my readers what I have neversucceeded in obtaining myself. The aim of the bookhas also necessitated the omission of a number of importantastronomical discoveries, which find their naturalexpression in the