On the Determination of the Distance of a Comet from the Earth

Even while professionally engaged in banking, Sir John William Lubbock (1803–65) applied his formidable mind to scientific questions. Several of his early writings on astronomy - his particular sphere of interest - are gathered together in this reissue, notably On the Determination of the Distance of a Comet from the Earth, and the Elements of its Orbit (1832), On the Theory of the Moon and on the Perturbations of the Planets (1833), and An Elementary Treatise on the Computation of Eclipses and Occultations (1835). Lubbock received a Royal Society medal for tidal research in 1834, and herein is his Elementary Treatise on the Tides (1839). Also included is Lubbock's On the Heat of Vapours and on Astronomical Refractions (1840), in which he relates celestial observations to Gay-Lussac's gas expansion law. The collection closes with On the Discovery of the Planet Neptune (1861), Lubbock's lecture discussing how John Couch Adams first predicted the planet's existence.