Lost Discoveries: The Forgotten Science of the Ancient World

Large format book with many fascinating but sometimes oddly selected illustrations. For example, some very nice illustrations of Brahe's and Copernicus's theories of planetary motion are adjacent to discussions of the speculations of various ancient Greeks. Many portraits are Nuremberg Chronicle

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woodcuts. There are also reconstructions, taken from various sources and based on ancient descriptions. Probably the most fascinating of all is the illustration of an escapement for an enormous Chinese water clock. That is beautiful and fascinating.

The text is in two columns and well-written. The book was published in the 1970s and the author clearly believed that Columbus was unusual in believing the earth was round. This is now commonly understood to be false. Most navigators believed that the earth was round, but there was a lot of disagreement on its size, with some adhering to an estimate around that of Eratosthenes's and others, including Columbus, giving more credence to Ptolemy's smaller and far less correct estimate.

As with almost everybody, the author gives much more weight to Copernicus's "De Revolutionibus" than David Wootton believes is correct.

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