Though every child may now know more of the actual truths of the celestial motions than ever Ptolemy knew, yet the fact that his work exercised such an astonishing effect on the human intellect for some sixty generations, shows that it must have been an extraordinary production.  We must look into the career of this wonderful man to discover wherein lay the secret of that marvellous success which made him the unchallenged instructor of the human race for such a protracted period.

Unfortunately, we know very little as to the personal history of Ptolemy.  He was a native of Egypt, and though it has been sometimes conjectured that he belonged to the royal families of the same name, yet there is nothing to support such a belief.  The name, Ptolemy, appears to have been a common one in Egypt in those days.  The time at which he lived is fixed by the fact that his first recorded observation was made in 127 ad, and his last in 151 ad.  When we add that he seems to have lived in or near Alexandria, or to use his own words, “on the parallel of Alexandria,” we have said everything that can be said so far as his individuality is concerned.

Ptolemy is, without doubt, the greatest figure in ancient astronomy.  He gathered up the wisdom of the philosophers who had preceded him.  He incorporated this with the results of his own observations, and illumined it with his theories.  His speculations, even when they were, as we now know, quite erroneous, had such an astonishing verisimilitude to the actual facts of nature that they commanded universal assent.  Even in these modern days we not unfrequently find lovers of paradox who maintain that Ptolemy’s doctrines not only seem true, but actually are true.

In the absence of any accurate knowledge of the science of mechanics, philosophers in early times were forced to fall back on certain principles of more or less validity, which they derived from their imagination as to what the natural fitness of things ought to be.  There was no geometrical figure so simple and so symmetrical as a circle, and as it was apparent that the heavenly bodies pursued tracks which were not straight lines, the conclusion obviously followed that their movements ought to be circular.  There was no argument in favour of this notion, other than the merely imaginary reflection that circular movement, and circular movement alone, was “perfect,” whatever “perfect” may have meant.  It was further believed to be impossible that the heavenly bodies could have any other movements save those which were perfect.  Assuming this, it followed, in Ptolemy’s opinion, and in that of those who came after him for fourteen centuries, that all the tracks of the heavenly bodies were in some way or other to be reduced to circles.

Ptolemy succeeded in devising a scheme by which the apparent changes that take place in the heavens could, so far as he knew them, be explained by certain combinations of circular movement.  This seemed to reconcile so completely the scheme of things celestial with the geometrical instincts which pointed to the circle as the type of perfect movement, that we can hardly wonder Ptolemy’s theory met with the astonishing success that attended it.  We shall, therefore, set forth with sufficient detail the various steps of this famous doctrine.