Page:A short history of astronomy(1898).djvu/15

Rh which modern astronomy has accumulated; it would, for example, have been easy to have filled one or more volumes with an account of observations of sun-spots made during the last half-century, and of theories based on them, but I have in fact only given a page or two to the subject.

I have given short biographical sketches of leading astronomers (other than living ones), whenever the material existed, and have attempted in this way to make their personalities and surroundings tolerably vivid; but I have tried to resist the temptation of filling up space with merely picturesque details having no real bearing on scientific progress. The trial of Kepler's mother for witchcraft is probably quite as interesting as that of Galilei before the Inquisition, but I have entirely omitted the first and given a good deal of space to the second, because, while the former appeared to be chiefly of curious interest, the latter appeared to me to be not merely a striking incident in the life of a great astronomer, but a part of the history of astronomical thought. I have also inserted a large number of dates, as they occupy very little space, and may be found useful by some readers, while they can be ignored with great ease by others; to facilitate reference the dates of birth and death (when known) of every astronomer of note mentioned in the book (other than living ones) have been put into the Index of Names.

I have not scrupled to give a good deal of space to descriptions of such obsolete theories as appeared to me to form an integral part of astronomical progress. One of the reasons why the history of a science is worth studying is that it sheds light on the processes whereby a scientific theory is formed in order to account for certain facts, and then undergoes successive modifications as new facts are gradually brought to bear on it, and is perhaps finally abandoned when its discrepancies with facts can