Even while professionally engaged in banking, Sir John William Lubbock (1803 65) applied his formidable mind to scientific questions. Several of his early writings on astronomy - his particular sphere of interest - are gathered together in this reissue, notably On the Determination of the Distance of a Comet from the Earth, and the Elements of its Orbit (1832), On the Theory of the Moon and on the Perturbations of the Planets (1833), and An Elementary Treatise on the Computation of Eclipses and Occultations (1835). Lubbock received a Royal Society medal for tidal research in 1834, and herein...