Curiosa: Even Herschel nods ...

This morning's find in the queue: a crumbling, defaced, much-mended copy of First Lessons in Geography and Astronomy by J. A. Cummings. It seems to have been a moderately popular American textbook in the 1820s, distributed by various publishers up and down the east coast of the U.S. Let us pass over the geography lessons in silence, except to note the hand-colored maps (colored, possibly, by the same hand which drew a fat, angular, spike-haired figure on the title page -- a portrait of a teacher, perhaps? :-) and head straight for Lesson XXVI, The Solar System ...( Read more... )