WCP5143

A large tick in red pencil appears here; although there is no heading, the letter originates from ARW's London publisher Swan Sonnenschein & Co., founded in 1878 by William Swan Sonnenschein (1855-1931) a son of Adolphus Sonnenschein, a teacher and writer originally from Moravia, and his first wife Sarah Robinson Stallybrass. In the light of the hostility to Germans during the First World War William Swan Sonnenschein changed his surname to Stallybrass for the remainder of his life, as did some of his family.

Barnard, Edward Emerson (E. E. Barnard) (1857-1923). American astronomer. He joined the University of Chicago in 1895 as professor of Astronomy. He was a pioneering astrophotographer and was able to use the 40-inch (1,000 mm) telescope at Yerkes Observatory Chicago to take photographs of the Milky Way.

The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System. Its name is derived from its appearance as a dim glowing band arching across the night sky whose individual stars cannot be distinguished by the naked eye. In Wallace A. R. (1898). The Wonderful Century; Its Successes and Its Failures London, Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Chapter VI New applications of Light — spectrum analysis ARW discusses the distribution of stars and nebulae in the context of spectral analysis of the Milky Way. However, the book contains no photographic plates and the identity of the picture is not known.

The author is likely to be F. R. Stallybrass (see WCP5163 in the same hand), presumably a relative of the founder of the publishing house.