Prickard’s English Translation of Mundus Iovialis, Completed

Abstract

Until 1903, Simon Marius had a poor reputation among the English. In The History of Physical Astronomy, Robert Grant had gone so far as to label him an “impudent pretender” to the discovery of the moons of Jupiter. This changed after the publication, in 1903, of Jean Abraham Chrétien Oudemands and Johannes Bosscha’s “Galilée et Marius” in the Archives Néerlandaises des Sciences Exactes et Naturelles, when W.T. Lynn, a prolific author of popular books and articles on astronomy and biblical chronology, took up his cause. In a letter published in The Observatory of June 1903, Lynn reviewed the paper, repeating the conclusions of Oudemans and Bosscha, that Marius’s observations were more accurate than those of Galileo, that Marius never claimed to have been the first to observe Jupiter’s moons, and that this misunderstanding was based on the fact that Marius used the Julian, not the Gregorian, calendar. Lynn, who should have known better, also repeated the Oudemans and Bosscha’s claim that anyone who had a telescope in 1609 “could hardly fail to notice the little stars near Jupiter, which continued observation would show were moving around the planet” (p. 255).