Written up from a course of lectures Lodge gave in 1887, these chapters follow the founders of modern astronomy one by one: Copernicus and the moving earth, Tycho Brahe’s observatory, Kepler’s laws, Galileo’s telescope and his trial before the Inquisition, then Newton and his successors, ending with the theory of the tides.
A physicist’s warm, readable history of how astronomy became a science, still a fine introduction for curious readers. Download the free EPUB.