At the
age of seventeen he was entered as a commoner at Queen's College,
Oxford, and the reputation that he brought with him to the University
may be inferred from the remark of the writer of "Athenae
Oxonienses," that Halley came to Oxford "with skill in Latin, Greek,
and Hebrew, and such a knowledge of geometry as to make a complete
dial." Though his studies were thus of a somewhat multifarious
nature, yet it is plain that from the first his most favourite
pursuit was astronomy. His earliest efforts in practical observation
were connected with an eclipse which he observed from his father's
house in Winchester Street. It also appears that he had studied
theoretical branches of astronomy so far as to be conversant with the
application of mathematics to somewhat abstruse problems.
Up to the time of Kepler, philosophers had assumed almost as an axiom
that the heavenly bodies must revolve in circles and that the motion
of the planet around the orbit which it described must be uniform. We
have already seen how that great philosopher, after very persevering
labour, succeeded in proving that the orbits of the planets were not
circles, but that they were ellipses of small eccentricity. Kepler
was, however, unable to shake himself free from the prevailing notion
that the angular motion of the planet ought to be of a uniform
character around some point.
Pages:
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184