United States or Cameroon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


As Delambre and Grant have said, this fiction only retarded the progress of pure science. It had no sort of relation to the more modern, but equally misleading, "nebular hypothesis." While many were talking and guessing, a giant mind was needed at this stage to make things clear. We now reach the period which is the culminating point of interest in the history of dynamical astronomy.

Delambre, Legendre, Biot, insisted on the devotion, and what they termed the courage, with which I had combated arduous difficulties, whether in carrying on the observations, or in saving the instruments and the results already obtained. They drew an animated picture of the dangers I had undergone.

To use the words of Delambre, in drawing attention to the strange conception, By this third motion the earth, he held, made a revolution on itself and on the poles of the ecliptic once a year.... Copernicus did not know that motion in a straight line is the natural motion, and that motion in a curve is the resultant of several movements.

This establishment excited and obtained the reverification of the measure of an arc of the meridian, in order to serve as a basis for the uniformity of the weights and measures which the government wished to establish. MECHAIN, DELAMBRE, NOUET, TRANCHOT, and PERNY were dispatched to different places from Barcelona to Dunkirk.

It was begun by Delambre and Mechain, from Dunkirk to Barcelona, and thence extended, by Biot and Arago, to the island of Formentera near Minorea. Its length was nearly twelve and a half degrees. Besides this method of direct measurement, the figure of the earth may be determined from the observed number of oscillations made by a pendulum of invariable length in different latitudes.

From the father of Astronomy, as Delambre calls him, to Ptolemy, the first man who seems really to have appreciated him, we have not a discovery, hardly an observation or a name, to fill the gap. Physical sages there were; but they were geometers and mathematicians, rather than astronomic observers and inquirers.

The cool-headed Delambre, in his "Histoire de l'Astronomie," speaks of Kepler with the heat of a pamphleteer, and cannot repress a frequent sneer at his contemporary, Galileo. We know the splendor of the Newtonian synthesis; yet we do not find ourselves affected by Newton's character or discoveries. He touches us with the passionless love of a star.

Delambre, in his Histoire de l'Astronomie Ancienne , ridicules the opinion of Bailly, and considers that the progress made by all of these nations is insignificant. It will be well now to give an idea of some of the astronomy of the ancients not yet entirely discredited. China and Babylon may be taken as typical examples. China.

Obviously, as Delambre infers, by inspecting their registers; by comparing the successive intervals; by finding that some of the intervals were alike; by seeing that these equal intervals were eighteen years apart; by discovering that all the intervals that were eighteen years apart were equal; by ascertaining that the intervals formed a series which repeated itself, so that if one of the cycles of intervals were superposed on another the divisions would fit.

At that time the planet Uranus had just been discovered by Herschel, and the Academy of Sciences offered as the subject for one of its prizes the determination of the planet's orbit. Delambre made this determination and won the prize a feat that brought him at once into prominence. By his writings he probably did as much towards perfecting modern astronomy as any one man.