Die Geschichte der Sternkunde: von den ersten Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart

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PROF. ERNST ZINNER is to be congratulated on having produced a captivating volume. What is most astonishing is the easy mastery with which he reviews the very different subjects that are contained in his work. There is here no heavy muster of facts, but enough to enable us to understand the lines of discovery and the development of ideas, the causes that contributed to progress, stagnation and decay, and the difficulties that had to be encountered. Astronomy is throughout brought into relation to the civilisation, the religion, the educational organisation, and the material environment of each age, and yet every important advance in observation, in theory, in apparatus is duly recorded. It seems strange to find combined in one book the beliefs of primitive peoples, the results of archaeological research in Egypt and the Euphrates valley, the work of the Greek mathematicians, and of medieval schoolmen; the steady march of modern dynamical and observational astronomy, with a remarkable appreciation of the present position of research and of the conditions that govern research in all the numerous departments of present-day astronomy; and in each case the treatment is illuminating. It would be an achievement to have acquired such familiarity in a lifetime, but it may be noted that our author was only forty-four years of age when this volume appeared. Die Geschichte der Sternkunde: von den ersten Anfangen bis zur Gegenwart. Von Prof. Dr. Ernst Zinner. Pp. xi + 673 + 13 Tafeln. (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1931.) 21.80 gold marks.