George Howard Darwin Tides and Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System

Annotation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. 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.<br><br>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.