NavList:

Last week, I wrote:
"[Thony Christie, in his blog,] apparently agrees on everything that had bothered me about the story, and he also spotted one funny historical error that got by me: the great astronomer Hevelius published the transit observations of Horrocks in 1662. That was four years before the Great Fire of London which the author of the play and the media coverage cite as one of the reasons that the work of Horrocks had been lost to history, which just wasn't true anyway."

After Alex Eremenko sent me an article on Horrocks, a lightbulb lit over my head, and I remembered 'I have notes'.

I have notes --in a notebook!-- on Horrocks from 25 years ago, which was even before I had taken much interest in the topic of lunars. And what I wrote last week, agreeing with Christie, is wrong. Jeremiah Horrocks was, in fact, nearly forgotten in England, the one place where he should not have been forgotten. And of course this was in the Civil War period from shortly after his death and extending through the time of the publication of his Venus transit observations by Hevelius in 1662. When the "scientific" or natural philosophy community in England woke up to his work (beginning apparently as a direct result of the publication by Hevelius in 1662), a systematic plan was launched to collect all the papers of Jeremiah Horrocks. But these things take time, especially in the late 17th century when the most rapid news travels at the speed of letters carried on horseback.

It was during a decade-long survey that it was found that several troves of Horrocks's papers had been lost during the war years. In addition, it was during this slow survey and collection process that the Great Fire of London raged and yet more of Horrock's papers were lost. That was in 1666. What was left of the work of Horrocks was compiled into an article of the "Posthumous Works of Jeremiah Horrocks" (Latin Opera Posthuma) first printed in 1672. So the dates make sense, not for the account of the prediction and observation of the transit of Venus, but instead for the publication of the other work by Horrocks; a publication which was inspired by the Venus article a decade earlier.

Poking around in my notes, I considered collecting references on Horrocks. As with so many interesting topics in the history of astronomy, long-time NavList member, Robert H. van Gent, has already done more on this than I could have managed. He compiled a fantastic collection of the available resources over a decade ago (judging by the styling of the web page, originally rendered in "Microsoft FrontPage", I would guess even as much as twenty years ago!): https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/venus/venus_text17.htm. See the references section.

Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA