Page:A short history of astronomy(1898).djvu/13



I tried to give in this book an outline of the history of astronomy from the earliest historical times to the present day, and to present it in a form which shall be intelligible to a reader who has no special knowledge of either astronomy or mathematics, and has only an ordinary educated person's power of following scientific reasoning.

In order to accomplish my object within the limits of one small volume it has been necessary to pay the strictest attention to compression; this has been effected to some extent by the omission of all but the scantiest treatment of several branches of the subject which would figure prominently in a book written on a different plan or on a different scale. I have deliberately abstained from giving any connected account of the astronomy of the Egyptians, Chaldaeans, Chinese, and others to whom the early development of astronomy is usually attributed. On the one hand, it does not appear to me possible to form an independent opinion on the subject without a first-hand knowledge of the documents and inscriptions from which our information is derived; and on the other, the various Oriental scholars who have this knowledge still differ so widely from one another in the interpretations that they give that it appears premature to embody their results in