RARE \"English Astronomer\" Richard A. Proctor Clipped Signature For Sale

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RARE \"English Astronomer\" Richard A. Proctor Clipped Signature:
$139.99

Up for sale a RARE! "English Astronomer" Richard A. Proctor Clipped Signature. 

ES-6346E

Richard

Anthony Proctor (23

March 1837 – 12 September 1888) was an English astronomer. He is best remembered for having produced one of

the earliest maps of Mars in 1867 from 27 drawings by the

English observer William Rutter Dawes. His

map was later superseded by those of Giovanni Schiaparelli and Eugène Antoniadi and

his nomenclature was dropped (for instance, his "Kaiser Sea"

became Syrtis Major Planum). He

used old drawings of Mars dating back to 1666 to try to determine the sidereal day of Mars. His final estimate, in 1873, was

24h 37m 22.713s, very close to the modern value of 24h 37m 22.663s. The

crater Proctor on Mars is

named after him. Richard Proctor's father died in 1850 and his mother attended

to his education. He was sent to King's College London and

subsequently earned a scholarship at St John's College, Cambridge. He graduated in

1860 as 23rd wrangler. Proctor

then read for the bar, but turned to astronomy and authorship instead, and in 1865 published

an article on the Colours of Double Stars in the Cornhill Magazine. His first book Saturn and its System was published in the same

year, at his own expense. This work contains an elaborate account of the

phenomena presented by the planet; but although favourably received by

astronomers, it had no great sale. He intended to follow it up with similar

treatises and nebulae, and had in fact commenced a monograph on Mars, when

the failure of a New Zealand bank deprived him of an

independence which would have enabled him to carry out his scheme without

anxiety as to its commercial success or failure. Being thus obliged to depend

upon his writings for the support of his family, and having learned by the fate

of his Saturn and its System that the general public are not

attracted by works requiring arduous study, he cultivated a more popular style.

He wrote for a number of periodicals; and although he has stated that he would

at this time willingly have turned to stone-breaking on the roads, or any other

form of hard and honest but unscientific labour, if a modest competence had

been offered him in any such direction, he attained a high degree of

popularity, and his numerous works had a wide influence in familiarising the

public with the main facts of astronomy. Proctor's earlier efforts were not

always successful. His Handbook of the Stars (1866) was refused

by Messrs Longmans and Messrs Macmillan, but being privately printed, it sold

fairly well. For his Half-Hours with the Telescope (1868), which

eventually reached a 20th edition, he received originally £25 from Messrs

Hardwick. Although teaching was uncongenial to him he took pupils in

mathematics, and held for a time the position of mathematical coach for

Woolwich and Sandhurst. Proctor's literary standing meantime improved, and he

became a regular contributor to The

Intellectual Observer, Chamber's Journal and

the Popular Science

Review. In 1870 appeared his Other Worlds Than Ours, in which he discussed the question of the

plurality of worlds in the light of new facts. This was followed by a long

series of popular treatises in rapid succession, amongst the more important of

which are Light Science for Leisure Hours and The Sun (1871); The

Orbs around Us and Essays on Astronomy (1872); The

Expanse of Heaven, The Moon and The Borderland of

Science (1873); The Universe and the Coming Transits and Transits

of Venus (1874); Our Place among Infinities (1875); Myths and Marvels of Astronomy (1877); The

Universe of Stars (1878); Flowers of the Sky (1879); The

Poetry of Astronomy (1880); Easy Star Lessons and Familiar

Science Studies (1882); Mysteries of Time and Space (1883) - Digital Copy; "The Great Pyramid" (1883) - Digital Copy; The

Universe of Suns (1884); The Seasons (1885); Other

Suns than Ours and Half-Hours with the Stars (1887). In

1881 Proctor founded Knowledge, a popular

weekly magazine of science (converted into a monthly in 1885), which had a

considerable circulation. In it he wrote on a great variety of subjects,

including chess and whist. Proctor was also the author

of the articles on astronomy in the American Cyclopaedia and

the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica,

and was well known as a popular lecturer on astronomy in England, America and Australia. Proctor

was elected a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in

1866. He became honorary secretary in 1872, and contributed eighty-three

separate papers to its Monthly Notices. Of these the more noteworthy dealt with

the distribution of stars, star clusters and nebulae, and the construction of

the sidereal

universe. He was an expert in all that related to map-drawing, and

published two star-atlases. A chart on an isographic

projection, exhibiting all the stars contained in the Bonner Durchmusterung, was

designed to show the laws according to which the stars down to the 9–10th

magnitude are distributed over the northern heavens. the Corona (Monthly Notices, xxxi. 184, 254) also deserve

mention, as well as his discussions of the rotation of Mars, by which be

deduced its period with a probable error of 0.005. He also vigorously

criticised the official arrangements for observing the transits of Venus of 1874 and 1882. Proctor's largest and

most ambitious work, Old and New Astronomy, left unfinished at his

death, was completed by Arthur Cowper Ranyard and

published in 1892 with a second edition in 1895. He settled in America some time after his

second marriage in 1881, and died of yellow fever at New York City on 12 September 1888. A

monument was later erected in his memory. Mary Proctor, his daughter by his first marriage, became an

astronomer and a successful lecturer and writer.

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