File:The Adolfo Stahl lectures in astronomy, delivered in San Francisco, California, in 1916-17 and 1917-18, under the auspices of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (1919) (14598343649).jpg

Identifier: adolfostahllectu00astruoft (find matches)
Title: The Adolfo Stahl lectures in astronomy, delivered in San Francisco, California, in 1916-17 and 1917-18, under the auspices of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Year: 1919 (1910s)
Authors: Astronomical Society of the Pacific Aitken, Robert Grant, 1864-1951
Subjects: Astronomy
Publisher: San Francisco Stanford University Press
Contributing Library: Gerstein - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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d yet he must hold them as worthless till they are verified by experi-ment. When there are any grounds of probability he must hold te-naciously to an old opinion, and yet he must be prepared at any momentto relinquish it when a clearly contradictory fact is encountered. Though it seems somewhat paradoxical, there is a greatdeal of truth in the saying that any good theory brings withit more problems than it removes. In like manner, each great*advance in modern astronomical theory has brought with ita host of new problems, and has opened up new fields of vastextent. We have seen our concepts of the size of the stellaruniverse steadily increase. Where once we doubtingly dis-cussed distances of a few thousand light-years, we now con-fidently postulate distances of hundreds of thousands ormillions of light-years. With the aid of the methods con-tributed by the allied sciences, our field of astronomical discov-ery has expanded in even greater ratio; like our subject-mat-ter, it is infinite.
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PLATE XXX. The Mills Spectrograph Attached to the 36-Inch Refractor. IMPORTANT EPOCHS IN THE DEVELOPMENTOF ASTRONOMY By R. T. Crawford When one stands in awe and admiration before theWoolworth building in New York, the Campanile of Venice,or that of the University of California at Berkeley, somemassive bridge with its network of girders, the Milan Cathe-dral, or any other wonderful work of man, rarely does heconsider the separate and distinct processes that contribute toits construction. It is the finished product that receives thewords of praise and commendation. The foundations andother parts out of sight are almost completely neglected. Thequestion Who was the architect? is nearly always asked;Who was the engineer? is seldom heard. It is quite rightthat we should praise and admire the designer, but we shouldgive due meed of praise and admiration to the engineer whofigures the stresses and strains of the various members of theedifice and designs the foundations and without whose gen

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