Abstract
THE French certainly have the art, which we have not, of putting science in an attractive form to the popular mind —attractive, and yet not at the expense of scientific accuracy. Good service is, therefore, done by the translation into easy and graceful English of works like this by M. Flammarion. From the very commencement he carries the reader with him by his enthusiasm. Instead of starting with a bare statement of facts—that the Sun is the centre ot the solar system, that it is so many hundred thousand miles in diameter, and has this, that, and the other planet revolving round it at such and such distances, he takes his reader out with him, as it were, to behold the heavens on a starry night; explains how it is that we see the sun only during a portion of the twenty-four hours; and speaks of the arrangement of the stars in clusters and nebulæ. Then he descends from the stars as a whole to a particular one, the Sun, and proceeds to describe in detail the solar system. And, throughout, the subject is treated with a graceful fancy and a wealth of illustration which make it very charming. Old Greek myths and fables of the astrologers, quotations from Byron and Lamartine, from Bryant and Victor Hugo, anecdotes of the value of astronomical knowledge, are brought in to point the moral and adorn the tale, and never appear to come amiss, or to be beside the mark. We must say a word about the illustrations, which are extremely good. We have never seen anything that so well recalls to our mind the appearance of the heavens through a powerful glass as Fig. 21, a part of the constellation of the Swan, as seen through the telescope; on the opposite page is placed, by way of contrast, the same seen by the naked eye. Author, translator, and artist have combined to produce a book which ought to be in the hands of every one who desires an introduction to “The Marvels of the Heavens.”
The Marvels of the Heavens.
By Camille Flammarion. From the French. By Mrs. Norman Lockyer. With 48 Illustrations. (London: R. Bentley, 1870.)
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The Marvels of the Heavens . Nature 3, 285 (1871). https://doi.org/10.1038/003285b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/003285b0