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Elijah H. Burritt
(20 Apr 1794 - 3 Jan 1838)
American mathematician and astronomer who wrote Geography of Heavens & Celestial Atlas (1833), which sold with many editions, for more than a generation. In it, he describes the constellations, their mythology and history. For the important individual named stars he explains the known facts about them.
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Science Quotes by Elijah H. Burritt (1 quote)
Beyond these are other suns, giving light and life to systems, not a thousand, or two thousand merely, but multiplied without end, and ranged all around us, at immense distances from each other, attended by ten thousand times ten thousand worlds, all in rapid motion; yet calm, regular and harmonious—all space seems to be illuminated, and every particle of light a world. ... all this vast assemblages of suns and worlds may bear no greater proportion to what lies beyond the utmost boundaries of human vision, than a drop of water to the ocean.
— Elijah H. Burritt
In The Geography of the Heavens and Class-Book of Astronomy (1874), 148 That knowledge is not happiness.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
