prevailing system of school education, this object is by no means regarded with the attention which its importance deserves. Learning is made too much a business of rote. The memory is too much cultivated at the expense of the powers of observation and reasoning, and the study of words is more attended to than the study of things. Books are the only sources of knowledge to which the attention of the young is much directed, though certainly they are of little use except as they serve to stimulate or direct them to the exercise of their own observation. Now Astronomy, like every other branch of natural science, is a study of such kind, that though it may be greatly aided by books, it cannot be pursued with any success by means of books alone. The heavens and the heavenly bodies themselves must be observed with assiduity and care, and what is learnt from books must be verified by the evidence of sense, or the study will be found not only destitute of interest or benefit, but wholly incomprehensible in many of its most important parts. Too often, indeed, the attempt is made to teach Astronomy as if it were a science that could be learnt sufficiently in the school-room or the closet, and the ill-fated learner is doomed to task his memory with a number of strange and difficult terms, to which he can attach no clear ideas, or led through a dull routine of problems on the globes, which he learns to perform according to the directions given, without at all understanding the principles upon which they are founded. Numerous as are the treatises on this important branch of education, few of them are written according to that method of analysis which alone is calculated to render the subject interesting and intelligible. Instead of leading the learner on by degrees from what is easy to what is difficult; instead of directing his attention in the first instance to actual appearances, and placing him in the situation of the first observers of the heavens,-they launch at once into the grand discoveries of modern Astronomy, which he is not as yet prepared to appreciate, or enter into a miscellaneous series of dry definitions, which can only serve to disgust and repel. It was from observing these defects in the common elementary treatises on Astronomy, that the Author, who is engaged in the business of private tuition, was led to draw up for the use of his pupils a treatise more accordant with his own ideas. This work he used for some time in manuscript, but finding occasion for a greater number of copies than he could thus conve niently obtain, he had recourse to the press, which naturally led to the thought of publication. He ventures, accordingly, to publish his little work, which lays claim to no other merit than that of simplifying and reducing to the capacity of the young a highly interesting and important subject, in the hope that it may meet the views and wishes of others who are engaged in the same pursuits, and who have felt the same want of a suitable help to their instructions. ALFRED STREET, LIVERPOOL, June, 1828. ERRATA. P. 24. 1. 7. after NESQ insert Fig. 4. P. 29. 1. 12. for plane of the horizon, read plane of the celes tial horizon. P. 145. 1. 14. for the read they. |