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Book Review: Neugebauer Papers Reprinted: Astronomy and History: Selected Essays

transmission of geoheliocentric ideas. William Donahue, in this edition of his thesis on the dissolution of the celestial spheres, has had the opportunity accorded relatively few authors: essentially to write a review of his own work. He states correctly that it has received no significant criticism, but it might be fair to add it has been sufficiently unavailable so as to have lacked the impact it might have had. Today there is more interest in the question of the spheres largely because of the quarrel between Swerdlow and Rosen, and since Donahue's new 1980 introduction there have been two particularly well-informed reviews, by E. J. Aiton (History ofscience, xix (1981), 75-114) and by N. Jardine (JHA, xiii (1982), 168-94). However, that interest has concentrated on spheres in the time of Copernicus and Tycho, whereas Donahue's thesis concerns the seventeenth century. As it stands, this thorough and detailed work remains a relatively untapped resource. The eighteenth-century natural philosopher and cleric William Whiston believed his greatest claim to fame was in succeeding Isaac Newton as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, and in this he was quite right. But, as Maureen Farrell has shown in her University of Manchester thesis, Whiston was "a man of considerable intellectual stature" and "a person of enthusiasm with wide-ranging interests". Readers can learn here of Whiston's geology, his longitude work, and his astronomy, as well as the heretical notions that lost for him the Lucasian chair.