"Astronomer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... doctrine of evolution cannot be well founded, because it requires the lapse of a very vast period of time; the duration of life upon the earth, thus implied, is inconsistent with the conclusions arrived at by the astronomer and the physicist. I may venture to say that I am familiar with those conclusions, inasmuch as some years ago, when President of the Geological Society of London, I took the liberty of criticising them, and of showing ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... meteorological phenomenon. See quotations, especially 1879, A. R. Wallace. The phrase is of course used elsewhere, but its Australian use is peculiar. The hot wind blows from the North. Mr. H. C. Russell, the Government Astronomer of New South Wales, writes—"The hot wind of Australia is a circulation of wind about the anticyclone in the rear of which, as it moves to the east, there is a strong force of wind from north to north- west, which blowing over the heated plains of the interior gathers up its excessive temperature ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... undoubtedly as great a mathematician and astronomer as Galileo. In 1607 at Ilfracombe and in South Wales, he had taken by hand and Jacob's staff, the old patriarchal method, valuable observations of the comet of that year, and compared notes with his astronomical pupil William Lower, and afterwards ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... may be afflicted, and collect the various remedies which Providence has scattered in the midst of the wilderness, nor be compelled on every emergency to be running in quest of a physician to heal him; he must be an astronomer, that he may if necessary ascertain by the stars the exact hour of the night and what part or climate of the world he is in; he must understand mathematics, because he will have occasion for them; and taking it for granted that he must be adorned with all the cardinal and theological ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... great pity he half spoiled it by not having taken the trouble just to read it over first. Poor Hofmann (38/3. August Wilhelm Hofmann, the other medallist of 1854.) came off in this respect even worse. It is really almost arrogant insolence against every one not an astronomer. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... expanse that reflected back the color of the sunlit clouds passed to one side as the ship took its station above the island, a continent in size, that had shown by its shape like a sharply formed "L" an identifying mark to the astronomer. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... A mathematician and astronomer from the Cambridge and also from a government observatory, who had donned the cassock, gave me much valuable information in regard to the mountain peaks of Lake George,* which he had carefully studied and accurately ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... years afterwards, Hevel of Dantzic, (1611-1688) a Polish astronomer—more generally known as Hevelius, his works being all written in Latin—undertook to correct Galileo's measurements. But as his method could be strictly accurate only twice a month—the periods ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... the philosopher Archytas of Tarentum invented a mechanical pigeon, which was filled with some kind of light air, and flew. The two schools of aeronautics were here reconciled. Other mechanists were Roger Bacon, who is reported to have designed a flying chariot; and Regiomontanus, astronomer and mathematician, who made a mechanical eagle which flew to meet the Emperor Charles the Fifth, on his solemn entry into the city of Nuremberg. It is not necessary to inquire whether these stories are true or false; what is certain is that the inventors did not leave their ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... persecuted science and all research which was based on the analysis of natural phenomena. Persecution begat mystery. So, to the people as well as to the nobles, physician and alchemist, mathematician and astronomer, astrologer and necromancer were six attributes, all meeting in the single person of the physician. In those days a superior physician was supposed to be cultivating magic; while curing his patient he was drawing their ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... dark, moonless night, with a ring of frost in the air, and only a star or two set sparsely in the vault of heaven; and you will find a sight as stimulating as the hoariest summit of the Alps. The solitude seems perfect; the patient astronomer, flat on his back under the Observatory dome and spying heaven's secrets, is your only neighbour; and yet from all round you there come up the dull hum of the city, the tramp of countless people marching out of time, the rattle of carriages and the continuous ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in 1575, and the art of printing, as well as every other art and science, lost a generous patron. But Day's work was not yet done, though he printed few large books after this date. A very curious folio, written by John Dee, the famous astronomer, entitled General and Rare Memorials concerning Navigation, came from his press in 1577. This work had an elaborate allegorical title-page, by no means a bad specimen of wood-engraving. It was a history in itself, the central ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... the Latin Language and English Literature. Dr. John Torrey held the chemical professorship. He was engaged with Dr. Gray in preparing the history of American Flora. Stephen Alexander's modest eye had watched Orion and the Seven Stars through the telescope of the astronomer; the flashing wit and silvery voice of Albert B. Dod, then in his splendid prime, threw a magnetic charm over the higher mathematics. And in that old laboratory, with negro "Sam" as his assistant, reigned Joseph Henry, the acknowledged king of American scientists. When, soon after, ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... Lord? That is my Lord Leonatus? Oh, learn'd indeed were that Astronomer That knew the Starres, as I his Characters, Heel'd lay the Future open. You good Gods, Let what is heere contain'd, rellish of Loue, Of my Lords health, of his content: yet not That we two are asunder, let that grieue him; Some griefes ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... anchored, first before a small cove, which was understood to be Port Maurice, and afterward in the Bay of Good Success. While the Endeavour was in this station, happened the memorable adventure of Mr. Banks, Dr. Solander, Mr. Monkhouse the surgeon, and Mr. Green the astronomer, together with their attendants and servants, and two seamen, in ascending a mountain to search for plants. In this expedition they were all of them exposed to the utmost extremity of danger and of cold; Dr. Solander ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... Lambert presided in those stately apartments. But this learned salon had only a limited vogue. The thinking was high, but the dinners were too plain. The real life of Mme. du Chatelet was an intimate one. "I confess that in love and friendship lies all my happiness," said this astronomer, metaphysician, and mathematician, who wrote against revelation and went to mass with her free-thinking lover. Her learning and eccentricities made her the target for many shafts of ridicule, but she counted for much with Voltaire, and ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... for his calling and aspired to that of science. The hardy adventurer who suggested this possibility said that it was difficult to imagine the soul stirred to the same high passion by the botanist, the astronomer, the geologist, the electrician, or even the entomologist as in former times by the poet, the humorist, the novelist, or the playwright. If the fictionist of whatever sort had succeeded in identifying himself with the scientist, he must leave the enjoyment of divine ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... cannot cope with her." And he put off his clothes and fled forth. Quoth the Caliph to Tawaddud, "Ree us thy riddle," and she replied, "O Commander of the Faithful, it is the button and the button-loop.[FN414]"—Then she undertook the astronomers and said, "Let him of you who is an astronomer rise and come forward." So the astronomer advanced and sat down before her; and, when she saw him, she laughed and said, "Art thou the astronomer, the mathematician, the scribe?" "Yes," answered he. Quoth she, "Ask of what thou wilt; success resteth with Allah." So ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Aristarchus also, according to Plutarch, [Footnote: Plut., Plac. Phil., ii. 24.] explained the apparent annual motion of the sun in the ecliptic, by supposing the orbit of the earth to be inclined to its axis. There is no evidence that this great astronomer supported his heliocentric theory with any geometrical proof, although Plutarch maintains that he demonstrated it. [Footnote: Quaest. Plat., viii. 1.] This theory gave great offense, especially to the Stoics, and Cleanthes, the head of the school at that time, maintained ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... sickness increased among the crew. Twenty-three men died, amongst them Green, the astronomer, who ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... interpreted to mean that the English would be driven from France and the King restored by the hand of a mere maid.[656] If we may believe the Inquisitor Brehal, some time before Jeanne's coming into France, a clever astronomer of Seville, Jean de Montalcin by name, had written to the King among other things the following words: "By a virgin's counsel thou shalt be victorious. Continue in triumph to the ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... instruments of precision, which we have been called upon to construct from time to time for the scientists in the astronomical as well as other branches of science during the last ten years. As a rule every astronomer is interested in some special line of research, which for a successful investigation requires a special adaptation of the instrument he proposes to use, and in such cases we are confident we can fill the requirements and shall be happy to correspond with interested parties. We are in ...
— Astronomical Instruments and Accessories • Wm. Gaertner & Co.
... "singing when she was told to sing, copying when she was told to copy, 'lending a hand' in the workshop, and taking her full share in all the stirring and exciting changes by which the musician became the king's astronomer and a celebrity; but she never, by a single word, betrays how these wonderful events affected her, nor indulges in the slightest approach to an original sentiment, comment, or reflection not strictly connected ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... BAILLY, Astronomer, account of, President of National Assembly, Mayor of Paris, receives Louis in Paris, and Paris Parlement, on Petition for Deposition, decline of, in prison, at Queen's ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... human race. The founder of the pyramid religion is described by one of the present leaders of the sect as 'the late worthy John Taylor, of Gower Street, London;' but hitherto the chief prophets of the new faith have been in this country Professor Smyth, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, and in France the Abbe Moigno. I propose to examine here some of the facts most confidently urged by pyramidalists in support of ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... dawn to dark,—in trying to work out the law of averages, following out the hints he gathered from the working of the wheel. He had always had a taste for mathematics, having rather "gone in" for that branch at college. Fleeting visions of becoming an astronomer had visited him from time to time; but the paralysis of wealth had deterred him while he was yet ostensible master of his own fate, and now the same inherent weakness of character which had made him a slave to ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... Protestantism, literature and education were stimulated. But under succeeding Swedish and Saxon dynasties, and through Jesuit instrumentality, religious liberty and national independence were lost, and Poland disappeared from the map of Europe. As a race the Poles boast such names as Copernicus the astronomer, Kosciusko the patriot warrior, and ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... proved. Yet the next day there was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in the Daily Telegraph, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest dangers that ever threatened the human race. I might not have heard of the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was immensely excited at the news, and in the excess of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a scrutiny of the ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... in the same state as before. Nothing was changed. The vast arch of the celestial dome glittered with stars, and constellations blazed with a light clear and pure enough to throw an astronomer into an ecstasy of admiration. Below them shone the Sun, like the mouth of a white-hot furnace, his dazzling disc defined sharply on the pitch-black back-ground of the sky. Above them the Moon, reflecting back his rays ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... which I had been hitherto ignorant of, when I should once have had time to verify my views of probability by looking into an encyclopaedia. So Pepin; save only that he is industrious while I was idle. Like the astronomer in Rasselas, I swayed the universe in my consciousness without making any difference outside me; whereas Pepin, while feeling himself powerful with the stars in their courses, really raises some dust here below. He is no longer in his spring-tide, but having been always busy he ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... not, by any means, the same thing to have searched the forests and to have recognised the frontiers. Indeed, the two things generally belong to two very different types of mind. I gravely doubt whether the Astronomer-Royal would write the best essay on the relations between astronomy and astrology. I doubt whether the President of the Geographical Society could give the best definition and history of the words "geography" ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... was not without its advantages. We are advertised no less by our rabid enemies than by our loving friends. Cosimo the Second, Grand Duke of Tuscany, had intimated that Florence would give the great astronomer a welcome. Galileo moved to Florence under the protection of Cosimo, intending to devote all his time ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... deal with questions of this sort by rack and fagot. In 1316 Peter of Abano, famous as a physician, having promulgated this with other obnoxious doctrines in science, only escaped the Inquisition by death; and in 1327 Cecco d'Ascoli, noted as an astronomer, was for this and other results of thought, which brought him under suspicion of sorcery, driven from his professorship at Bologna and burned alive at Florence. Nor was this all his punishment: Orcagna, whose terrible frescoes still exist on the walls of the Campo ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... sir, I do not presume to dissent from the very exalted authority of that most enlightened astronomer and profound cosmogonist, who had, moreover, the advantage of being inspired; but when I indulge myself with a ramble in the fields of speculation, and attempt to deduce what is probable and rational from the sources of analysis, experience, and comparison, I confess I am too ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... one of all the gathering fits the occasion half so well. And to exchange a word with them is to feel a pleasant contact with all the gentleness and mirth that have lodged with them during the space of their eighty years. The old gentleman is an astronomer and until lately, when he moved to a newer quarter of the town, he had behind his house in a proper tower a telescope, through which he showed his friends the moon. But in these last few years his work has been entirely mathematical and ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... point, however, most outsiders were in agreement—that he had invested an ancient subject with freshest interest through approaching it by an entirely new way. The plan followed was that of bringing together all the positive conclusions of the astronomer, the geologist, the physicist, and the biologist, and by weighing these carefully in the balance he arrived at what appeared to him to be the only reasonable conclusion. He therefore set out to solve the problem whether or not the logical inferences to be drawn ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... imposed upon it. If it be certain that all human individuals taken together would never have arrived, with the visual power given them by nature, to see a satellite of Jupiter, discovered by the telescope of the astronomer, it is just as well established that never would the human understanding have produced the analysis of the infinite, or the critique of pure reason, if in particular branches, destined for this mission, reason had not applied itself to special researches, and if, after having, as it ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... up the most perplexing question he had yet been called upon to decide. To that railroad, as to all others, there were, unfortunately, two ends—one of which lay within the Federal lines, and the other within the rebel lines. If Tom had been an astronomer, which he was not, the night was too cloudy to enable him to consult the stars; besides, some railroads are so abominably crooked that the heavenly orbs would hardly have been safe pilots. He did not know which ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... grown to be more than strictly scientific. The impression of the nearness of this planet, heightened by the wonderful distinctness of its geography as seen through a powerful telescope, appeals strongly to the imagination of the astronomer. On fine evenings I used to spend hours, not so much critically observing as brooding over its radiant surface, till I could almost persuade myself that I saw the breakers dashing on the bold shore of Kepler Land, and heard the muffled thunder of avalanches descending ...
— The Blindman's World - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... astronomer, curious astrologer and serious geometrician,' as he is styled by Lilly, was born in London on the 13th of July 1527. He was the son of Rowland Dee, who, according to Wood, was a wealthy vintner, but who is described by Strype as Gentleman Sewer to Henry VIII. In his Compendious ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... The astronomer tells us the immense distances and immense sizes of the stars—great facts, most interesting facts; but the imagination of literature gets hold of all the vastness and wonder and suggestion of such a universe, and by the gift of expression ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... the other hand, the illimitable is no less potent in mystery than the invisible, whence the dramatic effect of Keats' "stout Cortez'' staring at the boundless Pacific while all his men look at each other with a wild surmise, "silent upon a peak in Darien.'' It is with similar feelings that the astronomer regards certain places where from the peaks of the universe his vision seems to range out into endless empty space. He sees there the shore of his little ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... relatives in Baltimore. He formed some literary connections there, and had a volume of his poems published. It was entitled "Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, by Edgar A. Poe." "Al Aaraaf" was a poem about a star that a great astronomer had seen blaze forth ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... nor place; and to a degree—let the fact be stated softly and never hereafter be so much as whispered—all good men and women have at some time loved one-sidedly, the beloved being as unaware of the love as a star is of the astronomer who ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... was determined by the enemies of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester to attack him through his wife, who was believed to be influential with the young king. The first move was made by arresting a Roger Bolingbroke who had been connected with the duke and the duchess, and who was said to be an astronomer or necromancer. It was declared that he had cast the duchess's horoscope with a view to ascertaining her chances to the throne. Bolingbroke made confession, and Eleanor was then brought before "certayne ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... a Cavalieri, a Wallis, a Fermat, a Huygens, a Bacon, a Napier, and a goodly array of lesser lights, to say nothing of a Rembrandt or of a Shakespeare—there began to appear certain unifying principles connecting the great mass of material dug out by the ancients. Thus, in 1604 the great astronomer Kepler(4) introduced the notion that parallel lines should be considered as meeting at an infinite distance, and that a parabola is at once the limiting case of an ellipse and of a hyperbola. He also attributes to the parabola ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... was 10:15 P.M. A famous Egyptian astronomer walked into his office and called to his associate. "Hakim! Good news. He can come. Now we can find out what that accursed hydrogen-line ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... he gave the world a series of notes on what he saw there. Not possessing a telescope, he could but do his best with the methods available. Let us not jeer at his results; rather let us remember that this same astronomer found time to observe the heavens in addition to revolutionising thought in the brief ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... the highly illustrious mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy, whose system obtained respect and belief until the advent of Copernicus; the physician Galen; the philosopher-physician Sextus Empiricus, who was a good historian, highly sceptical, but well informed and ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... astronomer, Shepherd, or swain, whoever may behold, Feel some abstraction when they gaze on her: Great thoughts we catch from thence (besides a cold Sometimes, unless my feelings rather err); Deep secrets to her rolling light are told; The ocean's ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... bright, nor studded with as majestic constellations, as that of others. The starry vault that bends above us so far away, is the same in the number of its stars when gazed on by the savage with his unaided eye, and by the astronomer with the strongest telescope; and the Infinite God, who arches above us, but comes near to us, discloses galaxies of beauty and oceans of abysmal light in Himself, according to the strength and clearness of the eye that looks upon Him. So, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... used in our schools. Archimedes (287-212 B.C.), who studied under Euclid, made many important discoveries and advances in mechanics and physics. Eratosthenes (226-196 B.C.), librarian at Alexandria, is famous as a geographer [12] and astronomer, and made some studies in geology as well. Ptolemy (b.?; d. 168 A.D.) here completed his Mechanism of the Heavens (Syntaxis) in 138 A.D., and this became the standard astronomy in Europe for nearly fifteen hundred years, while his geography was ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... The astronomer searching through space for undiscovered planets and suns, has failed to fix his telescope upon these spiritual worlds, but the day will come when ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... 29, 1838. Since my last matters have assumed a totally different aspect. At the request of Monsieur Arago, the most distinguished astronomer of the day, I submitted the Telegraph to the Institute at one of their meetings, at which some of the most celebrated philosophers of France and of Germany and of other countries were present. Its reception was in the highest degree flattering, and the interest which they manifested, by the questions ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... he infers a cheese, he seeks and finds. The astronomer observes this and that; adds his this and that to the this-and-thats of a hundred predecessors, infers an invisible planet, seeks it and finds it. The rat gets into a trap; gets out with trouble; infers that cheese in traps lacks value, and meddles with that trap no more. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the flower, so does man inhale the poetry of nature, daguerreotyping it upon his understanding, either from the mountain's top, from the summit of the ocean wave, or from the wreck of battle; so does the astronomer learn from the firmament itself the relative proportions and distances, the transits, eclipses, and periodical appearances of other worlds, than that in which he lives, moves, and has his being; and so the man of science collects and combines the very elements themselves, ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... application of the photography of the present day, but it is germane to my purpose to remark that it has furnished a most valuable accessory to the methods of recording motions and lapse of time already in existence. In the hands of the astronomer and the meteorologist, it has yielded means of registering terrestrial, solar, planetary, and stellar phenomena, independent of the sources of error attendant on ordinary observation; in the hands of the physicist, not only does it record spectroscopic phenomena with unsurpassable ease and precision, ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... An Arab astronomer, whose work is notable as being the chief source of the celebrated astronomical treatise, "The Sphere," of Johannes Sacrobosco (John of Halifax), a contemporary Englishman. It was the popular text-book for over three centuries, and was ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... the air a bit anyway," he said with a grim look about his Holbein Astronomer old ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... natural right to dogmatize against and over me. He must certainly be aware of the current logical (not metaphysical) use of the phrase a priori: as when we say, that Le Verrier and Adams demonstrated a priori that a planet must exist exterior to Uranus, before any astronomer communicated information that it does exist. Or again: the French Commissioners proved by actual measurement that the earth is an oblate spheroid, of which Newton had convinced himself ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... small mass, and the rapidity with which, at the hour of sunset, it passes into the shadow of the earth. I will, however, calculate its orbit, and search for it again; for I have this evening seen what no human eye has ever beheld, I HAVE SEEN THE EARTH'S LITTLE MOON." While I watched, entranced, the astronomer, aided by his assistants, labored over multitudes of figures hour after hour, day after day; and from these computations an orbit was constructed for the ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... question. Does not experience teach us, that much if not the whole of our sentient nature becomes itself in turn a series of sensations? Does not the sight—that power which contains the whole visible space, and embraces distances which no astronomer can compute—does it not abjure its high prerogative, and take rank within the sphere of sense—itself a sensation—when revealed to us in the solid atom we call the eye? Here it is the touch which brings the sight ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Wisdom Hely J. P. My old chief Joe Cuffe. Mr V. B. Dillon, ex lord mayor of Dublin. I have moved in the charmed circle of the highest... Queens of Dublin society. (Carelessly) I was just chatting this afternoon at the viceregal lodge to my old pals, sir Robert and lady Ball, astronomer royal at the levee. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... about the astronomer. I thought all that is said about the dreadful effects of uncontrolled imagination ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... mountains in it." [49] This single dictum will be sufficient for those who bow to the influence of authority in matters of opinion. Settlement of questions by "texts" is a saving of endless pains. For that there are such lunar inhabitants must need little proof. Every astronomer is aware that the moon is full of craters; and every linguist is aware that "cratur" is the Irish word for creature. Or, to state the argument syllogistically, as our old friend Aristotle would have done: "Craturs" are inhabitants; the moon is full of craters; therefore ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... Perhaps not; but there is in you a spiritual sense that may even transcend knowledge. I once heard—was it not you who said so?—that the poet who 'reads God's secrets in the stars' soars nearer Him than the astronomer who calculates by figures and by line. As, even in the material universe, there are planets and systems which mock all human ken; so in the immaterial world there must be a boundary where all human reasoning fails, and we can trust to nothing but that inward inexplicable ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... like this; it is a religious orrery, a means of representing religious truths and bringing home religious facts to the consciousness of those who are unable to study the skies and the lunar and planetary theories for themselves. But no one who wishes to be a real astronomer would be content with winding up the orrery and watching the balls go round; he would know that the heavens must be studied for themselves, if one was ever to understand them accurately: and no one who wishes to be more than moderately ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... the Infinite God, who devised these laws of matter and of mind, and thereby bears up this marvellous Universe of things and men. Science has its New Testament; and the beatitudes of Philosophy are profoundly touching. An undevout astronomer is mad. Familiarity with the grass and the trees teaches us deeper lessons of love and trust than we can glean from the writings of Fénélon and Augustine. The great Bible of God is ever open before mankind. The eternal flowers of Heaven seem to shed sweet influence ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... was what they call an astronomer. His speciality was the stars, nothing less; an' he knew 'em by name an' could tell you how far off they are an' what they weigh an' how many moons they had an'—oh, he knew 'em the same as I know the home herd, an' he didn't only know what they had done—he knew what they was a-goin' to do, ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... assigned, this is equivalent to saying the actor could not have acted in any other way than he did, and, further, that his final act could have been foretold from the events which led up to it. It is a fact that in the realm of physical science we can foretell the future with accuracy. The astronomer predicts the precise moment and place in which Halley's comet will become visible from our earth. It is also a fact that we say of men and women who are our intimate friends: "I knew he (or she) would ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... here twice, without leaving his address. I have advanced as far in the astronomy and chronology of the Chinese as I can without an astronomer. They have begun with the beginning of the Chaldeans. With the language, too, I have reached firm soil and ground, through the 120 words which become particles. More by ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... these islands became better known, men's imaginations carried the mystery further out over the unknown western sea. The line of legend gradually extended itself till it formed an imaginary chart for Columbus; the aged astronomer, Toscanelli, for instance, suggesting to him the advantage of making the supposed island of Antillia a half-way station; just as it was proposed, long centuries after, to find a station for the ocean telegraph in the equally imaginary island of Jacquet, which has only lately disappeared ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the extraordinary names invented by the French Revolutionists. The word, according to Carlyle, means Fogarious—that is, Fog month. In the French Republican calendar, devised by the astronomer Romme, in 1792, Brumaire began on the twenty-second day of October and ended on the twentieth day of November. It remained for Brumaire, and the eighteenth day of Brumaire, of the year VIII, to extinguish the plural executive ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... the Bureau des Longitudes, recently published in Paris, appears a paper by the distinguished astronomer Arago—'On the Observations which have made known the Physical Constitution of the Sun and of different Stars; and an Inquiry into the Conjectures of the Ancient Philosophers, and of the Positive Ideas of Modern Astronomers on the Place that the Sun ought to occupy among the Prodigious ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... men of those days were nearly as weak in this matter as the most ignorant. Kepler, one of the greatest men of the world, an astronomer second to none, although he plucked from the stars the secrets of the universe, was an astrologer, and really believed that he could predict the career of a man by finding what star was in the ascendant at his birth. This great man breathed, so to speak, ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... magnitude, the geologist may admire the ample limits of his domain, and admit, at the same time, that not only the exterior of the planet, but the entire earth, is but an atom in the midst of the countless worlds surveyed by the astronomer. ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... safety, and sometimes even honour, while those who, occupied with some practical, useful, and noble pursuits uncomprehended by prince or people, denied their sorcery were despatched without mercy. The mathematician and astronomer Bolingbroke (the greatest clerk of his age) is hanged and quartered as a wizard, while not only impunity but reverence seems to have awaited a certain Friar Bungey, for having raised mists and vapours, which greatly befriended Edward IV. at the ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Ammophila that Spiders have a nutty flavour, as Lalande asserts; and you will see how coldly your hints are received. (Joseph Jerome Le Francois de Lalande (1732-1807), the astronomer. Even after he had achieved his reputation, he sought means, outside the domain of science, to make himself talked about and found these in the display partly of odd tastes, such as that for eating Spiders and ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... people to sit down weeping. The first thing was to rebuild their houses. This done there would be time to consider the future. The Lord Mayor and the Aldermen took counsel together how to rebuild the City. They called in Sir Christopher Wren, lately become an architect after being astronomer at Cambridge, and Evelyn: they invited plans for laying out the City in a more uniform manner with wider streets and houses more protected from fire. Both Wren and Evelyn sent in plans. But while these were under consideration the ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... forget. But it may be well to point out that Mr. Whistler does not succeed in glorifying great artists when he declares that beauty "to them was as much a matter of certainty and triumph as is to the astronomer the verification of the result, foreseen with the light granted to him alone." No, he only sets up a false analogy; for the true parallel to the artist is the saint, not the astronomer; both are convinced, neither understands. Art is no more ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... Gilbert; of Sir Joseph Banks, the famous surgeon of the early nineteenth century, who had the honor of being the only man that ever held the presidential chair of the Royal Society longer than it was held by Newton; of James Watts, of "steam-engine" fame; of Sabine, the astronomer, also a president of the society; and of Dr. Falconer and Sir Charles Lyell, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... has attempted to fix the number of all the words used by the child, independently, before the beginning of the third year of life (and these only), is an astronomer, E. S. Holden, director of the Observatory of the University at Madison, Wisconsin. His results in the case of three children have been recently published (in the "Transactions of the American Philological ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... knowledge, but it appears to me that therein is human arrogance: it is, as one should say, "I will be as wise as God." "That you shall be!" said the serpent to our first parents when it would seduce them to eat of the tree of knowledge. Through my understanding I must acknowledge the truth of what the astronomer teaches and proves. I see the wonderful, eternal omniscience of God in the whole creation of the world—in the great and in the small, where the one attaches itself to the other, is joined with the other, in an endless harmonious entireness; and I tremble in my greatest need and sorrow. ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... favor of the simian side. Curiosity may be as debasing, I grant you, as craft. And craft might turn into artifices of a kind which would be noble and fine. Just as the ignorant and fitful curiosity of some little monkey is hardly to be compared to the astronomer's magnificent search, so the craft and cunning we see in our pussies would bear small relation to the high-minded planning of some ruler of ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... happiest moments of my moral existence were thus obtained, while our family was growing in the fields of Normandy. It happened that a distinguished astronomer selected a beautiful seat, that was placed on the very margin of our position, as a favorite spot for his observations and discourses; from a recollection of the latter of which, in particular, I still derive indescribable satisfaction. It seems as only ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... such little worlds as those in question. If nothing short of the marvellous is to satisfy us, who shall say that even this will not present itself to the far-piercing ken of the new monster telescope—refracting, not reflecting—established on Wandsworth Common, at the cost of an amateur astronomer, for the promotion of the celestial science? Lord Rosse has now a competitor; and with a tube of eighty feet in length, and the power of looking direct at the distant object, may we not hope to hear of great discoveries by means of the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... by looking at them. I don't need to read every line of a book to know whether it's wise or foolish, worth while or not. I don't need to know a human being for years or for hours or for minutes even, before I can measure certain things. I measured you. It's like astronomy. An astronomer wants to get the orbit of a star. He takes its position twice—and from the two observations he can calculate the orbit to the inch. I've got three observations of your orbit. Enough—and ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... when the writers make the birds go out of sight into the sky. I could easily follow them on this occasion, though, if I took my eye away for a moment, it was very difficult to get it back again. I had to search for them as the astronomer searches for a star. It may be that in the spring, when the atmosphere is less clear and the heart of the bird full of a more mad and reckless love, that the climax is not reached until the eye loses sight ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... Lieutenant Waxel, second in command, George William Steller, the famous scientist, Bering's friend, on board. On the St. Paul, under the stanch, level-headed Russian lieutenant, Alexei Chirikoff, were seventy-six men, with La Croyere d'Isle as astronomer. Not the least {21} complicating feature of the case was the personnel of the crews. For the most part, they were branded criminals and malcontents. From the first they had regarded the Bering expedition with horror. They had joined it under compulsion for only six years; ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... Arabic. Nearly all of these men took not alone medical science, but the whole round of physical science, for their special subject. A typical example in the ninth century was Abuhassan Ben Korra, many of whose family during succeeding generations attracted attention as scholars. He became the astronomer and physician of the Caliph Motadhid. His translations in medical literature were mainly excerpts from Hippocrates and Galen meant for popular use. These Christian translators, thoroughly scientific as far as their times permitted them to be, were wonderfully industrious in their work ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... for the first time to command men, for his duties hitherto had been those of military engineer, astronomer, or staff-officer. The act of Congress directing that two new cavalry regiments should be raised excited an ardent desire in the officers of the army to receive appointments in them, and Lee was transferred from his place of engineer ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... dispensing suspensions and expulsions in a vain effort to prove that the school is both omniscient and omnipotent. We have tried to transform a poet into a mechanic, a blacksmith into an artist, and an astronomer into a ditcher. And our complacency in the presence of the misfits of the school is the saddest tragedy of all. We have taken counsel with tradition rather than with the nature of the pupil, the while ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... Miss Bennett:—I am delighted to write to you this morning. We have just eaten our breakfast. Mildred is running about downstairs. I have been reading in my book about astronomers. Astronomer comes from the Latin word astra, which means stars; and astronomers are men who study the stars, and tell us about them. When we are sleeping quietly in our beds, they are watching the beautiful sky through the telescope. A telescope is like a very strong eye. ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... especial virtue in that. I named her after the French empress, not because I am a particular admirer of that remarkable but unfortunate woman's character, but for the reason that upon one occasion she secured a pension of eight hundred francs for the astronomer LeBanc, who had already added to the sum of human happiness by locating an asteroid near the left limb of the sun, and who subsequently discovered a greenish yellow spot on the outer ring of the planet Saturn. I never hear my dear little girl's voice or see her sweet ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... to time by the wailing of a child. The sounds came from the rooms of the Ulphs, which were directly overhead, and by morning she was convinced that there was a case of serious illness in the German family. Led by her sympathies, and also by the hope of thawing the reserve of the eccentric old astronomer, she resolved to go and ask if she could be of ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... In 1699, that celebrated astronomer, Dr Edmund Halley, was appointed to the command of his majesty's ship the Paramour Pink, on an expedition for improving the knowledge of the longitude, and of the variation of the compass; and for discovering the unknown lands supposed to lie in the southern part of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... stretcheth foorth an huge length, insomuch that the farthest Chinian inhabitants that way doe behold the North pole eleuated, at least 50 degrees, and perhaps more also: whereupon a man may easilie coniecture (that I may speake like an Astronomer) how large the latitude of this kingdom is, when as it containeth about more then 540 leagues in direct extension towards the North. But as concerning the longitude which is accounted from East to West, it is not so exactly found out, that it may be distinguished into degrees. [Sidenote: ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... morrow of his departure came further accounts of the doings of the Spaniards that plunged Montezuma into still greater alarm. In his terror he sent for an astronomer, noted throughout the land for the truth of his divinations. The astronomer came, and was received by the emperor privately. What he told him I do not know, but at least it was nothing pleasant, for that very night men were commanded to pull ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... of his stay in this port to make some necessary repairs in his vessel, and to confirm the statements of Captain Clerke, who had succeeded Cook in the command of his last expedition, and those of Delisle de la Croyere, the French astronomer, who had ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... comprehends the dignity of his art. The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man. Except this one restriction, there is no object standing between the Poet and the image of things; between this, and the Biographer and Historian, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... spots on his disk (to us the faint indications of movements of unimagined grandeur in his luminous atmosphere), a solar eclipse, a transit of the interior planets, the mysteries of the spectrum—all phenomena of vast importance and interest. But night is the astronomer's accepted time: he goes to his delightful labors when the busy world goes to its rest. A dark pall spreads over the resorts of active life; terrestrial objects, hill and valley, and rock and stream, and the abodes of men, disappear; ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... of an university, or separate from it, might be undertaken the erection of an astronomical observatory, with provision for the support of an astronomer, to be in constant attendance of observation upon the phenomena of the heavens, and for the periodical publication of his observations. It is with no feeling of pride as an American that the remark may be made that ...
— A Compilation of Messages and Letters of the Presidents - 2nd section (of 3) of Volume 2: John Quincy Adams • Editor: James D. Richardson
... remedy: and the interval between his operation and the generally perceptible effect of it, is no greater, less indeed than in many other departments of the great human effort. The 'E pur si muove' of the astronomer was as bitter a word as any uttered before or since by a poet over his rejected living work, in that depth of conviction which is so like despair." The volume in which Browning's essay appeared was withdrawn from ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... without carrying a particular branch of learning into its recesses. He had increased his school acquisitions a little, by the study and practice of Navigation, and had several works that he was fond of reading, which may have made him a somewhat more accurate astronomer than those who get only leading ideas on the subject. Hours at a time did Mark linger on the Summit, studying the stars in the clear, transparent atmosphere of the tropics, his spirit struggling the while to get into closer communion with that dread Being which had produced ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... honest man knows a knave to his cost, And is neither physician, or skill'd physiognomer, palmester, nor astronomer, But a plain man of the country, like me, That knows a knave, if he do but see ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... seacoast, including Aldborough, doubly dear to him from its association with the memory and poetry of Crabbe. Once upon a time he dined with Sir Robert Peel, when he had the pleasure of meeting Airy, the late Astronomer Royal, whom he had known as a lad at Playford. The dinner with Sir Robert Peel ended satisfactorily, as it resulted in the bestowal by the Queen on the poet of a pension of 100 pounds a year. He was now beyond the fear of being tempted to commit forgery, ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... 68; Vice-Rector, 68. Dissensions in the University, 69; their origin in the academic constitution, 70. Enlightened educational policy of the University authorities, 71. James Watt, University instrument-maker; Robert Foulis, University printer, 71. Wilson, type-founder and astronomer. The Academy of Design. Professor Anderson's classes for working men, 72. Smith and Watt, 73. Smith's connection with Foulis's Academy of Design, 74. Smith and Wilson's type-foundry, 77. Proposed academy of dancing, ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... refrain from referring, with sentiments of admiration and gratitude, to my friend Thomas Maclear, Esq., the accomplished Astronomer Royal at the Cape. I shall never cease to remember his instructions and help with real gratitude. The intercourse I had the privilege to enjoy at the Observatory enabled me to form an idea of the almost infinite variety of acquirements necessary to form a true ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... contract astronomer told Shallett. I've checked with two astronomers here. They say that even when Venus is at full magnitude you can barely see it in the daytime even when you're looking for it. It was only half magnitude that day, ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... at a familiar word or object, and it gradually ceases to be familiar. Certainly for the most part, the way we see things is a combination of what is there and of what we expected to find. The heavens are not the same to an astronomer as to a pair of lovers; a page of Kant will start a different train of thought in a Kantian and in a radical empiricist; the Tahitian belle is a better looking person to her Tahitian suitor than to the readers of the ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... this country was sent by Sir John Colborne, in 1835, with a view of ascertaining its capabilities for settlement. An officer of engineers, Captain Baddely, was the astronomer and geologist; a naval officer the pilot; with ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... last night, from a signal seen (appended to a balloon) just over the western horizon. It was stationary for ten minutes, a blood-red light, seen through a hazy atmosphere. I thought it was Mars, but my eldest daughter, a better astronomer than I, said it was neither the time nor place for it to be visible. The air was still, and the dismal barking of the ban-dogs conjured up the most direful portents. All my neighbors supposed it to be a signal ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... Pleiades. colures[obs3], equator, ecliptic, orbit. [Science of heavenly bodies] astronomy; uranography, uranology[obs3]; cosmology, cosmography[obs3], cosmogony; eidouranion[obs3], orrery; geodesy &c. (measurement) 466; star gazing, star gazer[obs3]; astronomer; observatory; planetarium. Adj. cosmic, cosmical[obs3]; mundane, terrestrial, terrestrious|, terraqueous[obs3], terrene, terreous|, telluric, earthly, geotic[obs3], under the sun; sublunary[obs3], subastral[obs3]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... progress he must learn to understand that the moral world only becomes beautiful when we relinquish our ridiculous standards of what is right and wrong, just as the firmament became a thousand times more wonderful and beautiful when Galileo discovered that the earth moved. Had Kant lived before the astronomer he would have been a great metaphysician, but he would not have written the celebrated passage "Two things fill the soul with undying and ever-increasing admiration, the night with its heaven of stars above us and in our hearts the moral law." The only fault I find with this passage ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... shadowy forms of saints and angels are around him. He has raised his eyes from his cartoon to study one of these. In his right hand is the opera-glass with which he scrutinises the details of distant groups. The upturned face, with its expression of contemplative intelligence, is like that of an astronomer accustomed to commerce with things above the sphere of common life, and ready to give account of all that he has gathered from his observation of a world not ours. In truth the world created by Correggio and interpreted by Toschi is very far removed from that of actual existence. No painter ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... changes, in fact, are not to the point. It has been known, as far back as our records go, that man running wild in the woods is different to man kennelled in a city slum; that a dog seems to understand a shepherd better than a hewer of wood and drawer of water can understand an astronomer; and that breeding, gentle nurture and luxurious food and shelter will produce a kind of man with whom the common laborer is socially incompatible. The same thing is true of horses and dogs. Now there is clearly room for great changes in the world by increasing ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... argument on a denial that such an analogy should be drawn. Literary genius cannot be bequeathed and added to as a scientific discovery can. The modern poet does not stand on Shakespeare's shoulders as the modern astronomer stands on Galileo's shoulders. Scientific discovery is progressive. Literary genius, like religious genius, is a miracle less dependent on time. None the less, we may reasonably believe that literature, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... carpenter's shop, a stable, a distillery, a camphene and oil store, or some other kind of building. In the nighttime, he knew the lights which mapped out the squares and the streets within his range of observation, almost as well as the astronomer knows the other lights that shine down upon the sleeping city from the heavens. He could fix the position of a fire by night rather better than by day, because he had the red reflection of the flames on well-known steeples, and high, prominent ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... Will Clark, rubbing his bruised leg. "It is beginning to show on you, too, Merne. Isn't it enough to be astronomer and doctor and bookkeeper and record-keeper and all that? No, you think not—you must sit up all night by your little fire under the stars and think and think. Oh, I have seen you, Merne! I have seen you sitting there when you should have been sleeping. ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... that men already possess religion and that they come to church to discuss it rather than to have it provided. They call men to be listeners rather than participants in their temples. Of course, one may find God through the mind. The great scholar, the mathematician or the astronomer may cry with Kepler, "Behold, I think the thoughts of God after him!" Yet a service which places its chief emphasis upon the appeal to the will through instruction has declined from that realm of the absolutes where ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... however, acquired some knowledge of the mathematics, and some skill both in architecture and in the anatomy of the human skeleton and muscles; while of perspective he perhaps knew well-nigh as much as was known at the time. I remember he preferred the Treatise on this art, of Ferguson the astronomer and mechanician, to any other; and used to say that the twenty years spent by the philosopher as a painter were fully redeemed, though they had produced no good pictures, by his little work on Perspective alone. My friend ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... enough is doubtless committed within its precincts by writers who venture there without the laborious preparation which this science, more than almost any other, demands. But the proceedings of the trained philologist are no more arbitrary than those of the trained astronomer. And though the former may seem to be straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel when he coolly tells you that violin and fiddle are the same word, while English care and Latin cura have nothing to do with each other, he is nevertheless no ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... astronomer is mad: True, all things speak a God; but, in the small Men trace out Him: in great ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... to the reform, which the astronomer Meton had wanted to introduce into the calendar. Cleostratus of Tenedos, at the beginning of the fifth century, had devised the octaeteris, or cycle of eight years, and this had been generally adopted. This is how this system arrived at an agreement between the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... mountains have been determined with exactitude. Galileo explained the phenomena of the lunar light produced during certain of her phases by the existence of mountains, to which he assigned a mean altitude of 27,000 feet. After him Hevelius, an astronomer of Dantzic, reduced the highest elevations to 15,000 feet; but the calculations of Riccioli brought them up again ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... that some little time elapsed before he was sufficiently master of himself to recur to the principal purpose of his presence. His box was on the first tier, where he could observe very generally and yet himself be sufficiently screened. As an astronomer surveys the starry heavens until his searching sight reaches the desired planet, so Lothair's scrutinizing vision wandered till his eye at length lighted on the wished-for orb. In the circle above his own, opposite to him but nearer the stage, he recognized the Campians. She had a star upon ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... past twelve a Gomez-Dep roadster appeared down the road, stopped at the garage. To Milt it was as exciting as the appearance of a comet to a watching astronomer. ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... of this deity in the moon; and it may therefore be presumed that it was the walls of this edifice that Professor Grinthausen, of Munich, lately mistook for an immense fortress. The error of the German astronomer would seem to corroborate the hypothesis of the Italian poet, who doubtless did not assign that local habitation to the goddess of fashion without mature reflection. Indeed, it cannot be denied that that planet possesses some mysterious influence ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various
... environment, reaching even across the oceans; in the library any person, without respect to age, color, or condition, if only he possess the key of literacy to unlock knowledge, can travel to the utmost limits of continents and seas, can dig with the geologist below the surface, or soar with the astronomer beyond the limits of aviation, can hob-nob with ancient worthies or sit at the feet of the latest novelist or philosopher, and can learn how to rule empires from as good text-books as kings or ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... and chemists of to-day is one of the most impressive triumphs of modern science. Quite apart from radium and electrons and other sensational discoveries of recent years, the study of ordinary matter is hardly inferior, either in interest or audacity, to the work of the astronomer. And there is the same foundation in both cases—marvellous apparatus, and trains of mathematical reasoning that would have astonished Euclid or Archimedes. Extraordinary, therefore, as are some of the facts and ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... his marriage losing his wife, he resolved on giving his daughter a masculine education. Meribah was early instructed in all the modern accomplishments, as well as in classical knowledge. She was mistress of the Latin, French, and Italian languages; she was said to be a perfect arithmetician and astronomer, and possessed the art of painting on silk to a degree of exquisite perfection. But, alas! with all these advantages, she was addicted to one vice, which at times so completely absorbed her faculties ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... do it in a general way, though I am not an astronomer in the scientific sense of the word," answered the captain. "We are approaching the Daedalus lightship. I suppose you ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... treason. This detestable espionage met with a too speedy success. The duke, who was especially fond of the society of learned men, retained in his family many priests and clerks, and among them one Roger Bolingbroke, "a famous necromancer and astronomer." This was a sufficient ground for the enmity of the cardinal to feed upon, and he determined to annihilate at one blow the domestic happiness of his rival. He arrested the Duchess, Bolingbroke, and a witch called Margery Gourdimain, or Jourdayn, on the charge of witchcraft and treason. ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... through any one of them. However, there is a little brochure in this direction which we feel may here be appropriately noticed. It is called, Watched by the Dead: A Loving Study of Charles Dickens's half-told Tale, 1887, and was written by R. A. Proctor, F.R.A.S., the Astronomer, whose untimely death from fever in America was announced after our return from our week's tramp. The author had evidently studied the matter both lovingly and attentively, and starts with the assumption ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... wee, i' the houp o' better hearin' what the h'avens declared aboot the glory o' God: I wud fain un'erstan' the speech ae day cried across the nicht to the ither. But I was sair disapp'intit. The things the astronomer tellt semple fowk war verra won'erfu', but I couldna fin' i' my hert 'at they made me think ony mair o' God nor I did afore. I dinna mean to say they michtna be competent to work that in anither, but it wasna my experrience o' them. My hert ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... separating his field from that of the other naturalists, as we may fitly term all students of Nature, is compelled from time to time to call in the aid of his brethren who cultivate other branches of learning. The modern astronomer needs to know much of chemistry, or else he can not understand many of his observations on the sun. The geologists have to share their work with the student of animal and vegetable life, with the physicists; they must, moreover, know something ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured. When the storm has passed and the hour of calm settles on the ocean, when the sunlight bathes its peaceful surface, then the astronomer and surveyor take the level from which they measure ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... benefactor who introduced the cultivation of the potato and thus blessed millions of his starving countrymen, lie with the Prince of Masserano, and with exiled queens and princes of Further India. Gay-Lussac the chemist, Laplace the astronomer, Larrey the surgeon, de Suze the advocate, are here, and with them are Talma, Bellini, Rubini; de Balzac, Beaumarchais, Beranger; Moliere and Lafontaine, and scores of other men whose names and whose ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... astronomy, and was chief of the expedition to the coast of Labrador to observe the solar eclipse in August, 1869. James Ferguson (1797-1867), an Engineer employed on the construction of the Erie Canal, was born in Perthshire. He was later Assistant Astronomer at the United States Naval Observatory, and discovered three asteroids, for which he received medals from the French Academy of Sciences. Ormsby McKnight Mitchel (1810-62), who was Director of the Cincinnati Observatory (1845) and later of ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... the preparations, that a special officer was appointed to take them in charge. To him were accorded large privileges, very considerable appointments, and a retinue equal to a prince's, counting in a chancellor, treasurer, comptroller, vice-chamberlain, divine, philosopher, astronomer, poet, physician, master of requests, clown, civilian, ushers, pages, footmen, messengers, jugglers, herald, orator, hunters, tumblers, friar, and fools. Over this mock court the mock monarch presided during the holidays ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... grotesqueness, what a cocked hat is, at the present age, among ordinary beavers. Her elephantine bulk was houdahed with a castellated poop like the leaning tower of Pisa. Poor Israel, standing on the top of this poop, spy-glass at his eye, looked more an astronomer than a mariner, having to do, not with the mountains of the billows, but the mountains in the moon. Galileo on Fiesole. She was originally a single-decked ship, that is, carried her armament on one gun-deck; but cutting ports below, in her after part, Paul ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... M. LEVERRIER, the astronomer, has published a long and able argument in support of the free and universal use of the electric telegraph. He has supplied a most instructive and interesting exposition of the employment and utility of the invention, in all ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... of the world whose good opinion is worth having, Simon Newcomb was one of the best known of America's great men. Astronomer, mathematician, economist, novelist, he had well-nigh boxed the compass of human knowledge, attaining eminence such as is given to few to reach, at more than one of its points. His fame was of the far-reaching kind,—penetrating to remote regions, while that of some others has only ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... began to raise its head against the ancient Church. The Polish astronomer Copernicus had long since conceived his idea that the earth was not the centre of the universe. He even pointed out the proofs of his theory to a few brother-scientists; but the Church taught otherwise, so Copernicus kept silent till, on his death-bed, he let his doctrines be published ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... physical laboratory, whose end is the advancement of knowledge, is false and misleading. The expert had suggested a general research board to correlate researches; the professor cited the cases of Airy, the astronomer royal of England, who by his dominating position held back astronomical research in England for a generation, and of Sir Humphry Davy, who discouraged the work of Faraday, when the ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... Society in the lifetime of its founder was subjected to persecution and dispersed by angry mobs. Pythagoras possessed a prodigious mind. He is best known for his teaching in reference to the transmigration of souls, but he was also a great mathematician and astronomer. He taught that "number is the essence of everything," and his philosophy recognized that the universe is governed by law. God he represented by the figure 1, matter by the figure 2, and the universe by the combination 12, ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... Newton of the observed facts of the motion of the moon, the way he accounted for precession and nutation and for the tides; the way in which Laplace explained every detail of the planetary motions—these achievements may seem to the professional astronomer equally, if not more, striking and wonderful; but of the facts to be explained in these cases the general public is necessarily more or less ignorant, and so no beauty or thoroughness of treatment appeals to it ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... the triumphs of modern science naturally opens with Astronomy. The picture of the Universe which the astronomer offers to us is imperfect; the lines he traces are often faint and uncertain. There are many problems which have been solved, there are just as many about which there is doubt, and notwithstanding ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... of these phenomena. In Europe, as early as 1853, the work was taken up in the true scientific spirit, and Professor Marc Thury and the Count de Gasparin completely demonstrated the fact of telekinesis; and at about the same time that the Dialectical Society was getting into action, Flammarion, the astronomer, took up his study of the subject. But it was not until 1891 that anything like Crookes's searching analysis was made of a medium. This important sitting—a sitting which marks an epoch in science—took place in Milan, and was attended, ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... Library rooms are upon it, fronting the principal street; and back of the Exchange is a rough brick and mortar pillar to mark the spot where Sir J. Herschell, the astronomer, made ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... And you must not suppose that my particular branch of science is especially distinguished for the demand it makes upon skill in manipulation. A similar requirement is made upon all students of physical science. The astronomer, the electrician, the chemist, the mineralogist, the botanist, are constantly called upon to perform manual operations of exceeding delicacy. The progress of all branches of physical science depends upon observation, or on that artificial observation which is termed ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... it. It is spoken of in one of the most remarkable letters of Aeneas Sylvius, belonging to his earlier period. He writes to his brother: 'The bearer of this came to me to ask if I knew of a Mount of Venus in Italy, for in such a place magical arts were taught, and his master, a Saxon and a great astronomer, was anxious to learn them. I told him that I knew of a Porto Venere not far from Carrara, on the rocky coast of Liguria, where I spent three nights on the way to Basle; I also found that there was ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... 700 years before the Christian era, but we know nothing of the character or construction of the instrument. The earliest of all sun-dials of which we have any certain knowledge was the hemicycle, or hemisphere, of the Chaldaean astronomer Berossus, who probably lived about 300 B.C. It consisted of a hollow hemisphere placed with its rim perfectly horizontal, and having a bead, or globule, fixed in any way at the centre. So long as the sun remained above the horizon ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... "Situation, gentlemen," said the old general, smiling, "is something, but circumstances are necessary to make it valuable. There never was a finer night for an investigation of the stars, if I had been an astronomer; and I dare say that the spot which formed my position would have been capital for an observatory; but the torches which danced up and down through the old and very dingy casements of the mansion, were a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... in silence. "I know not why it is," said he, "but that story of yours, my friend, brings to my mind a story of a man whom I once knew—a great magician in his time, and a necromancer and a chemist and an alchemist and mathematician and a rhetorician, an astronomer, an astrologer, and a philosopher ...
— Twilight Land • Howard Pyle
... Clive returned to Madras, where he married Miss Maskelyne, sister to the Astronomer Royal, and immediately after returned to England. He was received with great honors by the Court of Directors, and, through the influence of Lord Sandwich, obtained a seat in Parliament; but his election having been set aside, he again turned his thoughts toward India, where both the company and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... next man I came across. You would have been that man. I know you do not carry much luggage, but you could have taken one or two trifles at least. He wanted a respectable English telescope, I remember, to see the stars with—a bit of an astronomer, you know. Chutney, too—devilish fond of chutney, the old boy was; quite a gastro-maniac. What a nuisance! Now he will be thinking I forgot all about it. And he needed a clothes-press; I was on ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... known authors, living between the second and the fifteenth century, besides those mentioned, who quote Tacitus, it will be found that their quotations are from the History, the Germany, or the Agricola; and this can be predicted with just as much confidence, as an astronomer predicts eclipses of the sun and the moon, and, for their verification, needs not wait to see the actual obscuration ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... strong and well-constructed ploughs, his light and convenient spades, and his sun-burnt daughters, and pointing to them exclaimed: "Here are my charms; this is my magic; these only are the witchcraft I have used." Zoroaster, the great philosopher and astronomer of the ancient East, was charged with divination and magic, merely, it is probable, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... unable to refute their theories, it could sneer at the authors, and answer them to the satisfaction of the generation in which they lived, at least by a general charge of lunacy. Some of their notions were no doubt as absurd as those of the astronomer in "Rasselas", who tells Imlac that he has for five years possessed the regulation of the weather, and has got the secret of making to the different nations an equal and impartial dividend of rain and sunshine. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier |
