The Earth's Beginning
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in the history of science and early popular science writing
- Self-learners who want to build long-form English reading skills through extensive reading
- Astronomy enthusiasts willing to view older theories from a historical perspective
- Teachers who need public-domain English science texts as course materials
Not a good fit for
- Readers seeking the latest conclusions of contemporary astronomy
- Those with weak English reading skills who need Chinese translation and annotation
- General readers who prefer strong plots or literary narrative
Reading tips
- Read the table of contents and introduction first to grasp the author's argumentative framework, then move on to specific chapters.
- Mark outdated terms or obsolete conclusions as you go, and consult modern explanations together after finishing.
- Read alongside our own or public-domain general astronomy books to appreciate how ideas have changed.
- Read one or two chapters a day and write brief summaries to avoid fatigue from long English sentences.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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About the author
Robert S. Ball (1840–1913) was an Irish astronomer who long served as Royal Astronomer. He devoted much of his life to popularizing astronomy, and was skilled at turning complex celestial mechanics into clear and accessible prose. Four of his works are held here: Great Astronomers, The Story of the Heavens, The Earth's Beginning, and Time and Tide: A Romance of the Moon. These books mainly concern the history of astronomy, the structure of the universe, the origins of the Earth and the Moon, and tidal motion; they combine solid knowledge with readability, written in a plain yet lively style. Public information is limited, and details of his life await further verification, but these works show that he had a lasting influence on English-language popular astronomy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
