Page:A short history of astronomy(1898).djvu/130

86 of learning. He inveighs warmly against excessive adherence to authority, especially to that of Aristotle, whose books he wishes burnt, and speaks strongly of the importance of experiment and of mathematical reasoning in scientific inquiries. He evidently had a good knowledge of optics and has been supposed to have been acquainted with the telescope, a supposition which we can hardly regard as confirmed by his story that the invention was known to Caesar who when about to invade Britain surveyed the new country from the opposite shores of Gaul with a telescope!

Another famous book of this period was written by the Yorkshireman John Halifax or Holywood, better known by his Latinised name Sacrobosco, who was for some time a well-known teacher of mathematics at Paris, where he died about 1256. His Sphaera Mundi was an elementary treatise on the easier parts of current astronomy, dealing in fact with little but the more obvious results of the daily motion of the celestial sphere. It enjoyed immense popularity for three or four centuries, and was frequently re-edited, translated, and commented on: it was one of the very first astronomical books ever printed; 25 editions appeared between 1472 and the end of the century, and 40 more by the middle of the 17th century.

68. The European writers of the Middle Ages whom we have hitherto mentioned, with the exception of Alfonso and his assistants, had contented themselves with collecting and rearranging such portions of the astronomical knowledge of the Greeks and Arabs as they could master; there were no serious attempts at making progress, and no observations of importance were made. A new school, however, grew up in Germany during the 15th century which succeeded in making some additions to knowledge, not in themselves of first-rate importance, but significant of the greater independence that was beginning to inspire scientific work. George Purbach, born in 1423, became in 1450 professor of astronomy and mathematics at the University of Vienna, which had soon after its foundation (1365) become a centre for these subjects. He there began an Epitome of Astronomy based on the Almagest, and also a Latin version of Ptolemy's planetary theory, intended partly