Ebook The Tides and Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System

In 1897 I delivered a course of lectures on the Tides at the Lowell Institute in Boston Massachusetts and this book contains the substance of what I then said. The personal form of address appropriate to a lecture is I think, apt to be rather tiresome in a book, and I have therefore taken pains to eliminate all traces of the lecture from what I have written.

A mathematical argument is, after all, only organized common sense, and it is well that men of science should not always expound their work to the few behind a veil of technical language, but should from time to time explain to a larger public the reasoning which lies behind their mathematical notation. To a man unversed in popular exposition it needs a great effort to shell away the apparatus of investigation and the technical mode of speech from the thing behind it, and I owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Lowell, trustee of the Institute, for having afforded me the occasion for making that effort.