Proctor, RICHARD ANTHONY, astronomer and popular author, was born at Chelsea in March 1834. He was educated first at King's College, London, and then at St John's, Cambridge, where, however, he devoted himself chiefly to athletics. He graduated in 1860 as twenty-third wrangler. His first literary venture was, in 1865, an article on 'Double Stars' in the Cornhill Magazine, and from that time he devoted himself to astronomy. In 1866 he was elected an F.R.A.S., and in 1872 its honorary secretary, but he retired in 1873 to make a lecturing tour in America. About this time he communicated to the R.A.S. some important papers on 'The Construction of the Milky Way,' 'The Transit of Venus,' 'Star Distribution,' &c.; and his name is associated with the accurate determination of the rotation of the planet Mars, and with the theory of the solar corona. One of his undertakings was the charting of the 324,198 stars contained in Argelander's great catalogue. His science magazine Knowledge was founded as a weekly in 1881, and became a monthly in 1885. He died at New York, September 12, 1888. He was a man of untiring energy, and, although the author of fifty-seven books, he found time to cultivate music, and was a great chess and whist player. His most important work was in connection with stellar distribution. As an author and lecturer he succeeded in interesting in astronomy a large public in America and the colonies as well as in England.
Among his works are Saturn and its System (1865), Handbook of the Stars (1866), The Constellation Seasons (1867), Half-hours with the Telescope (1868), Other Worlds than Ours (1870), Star Atlas (1870), Light Science for Leisure Hours (1871), The Sun (1871), The Orbs around Us (1872), Essays on Astronomy (1872), The Expanse of Heaven (1873), The Moon (1873), The Borderland of Science (1873), The Universe and the coming Transits (1874), Our Place among Infinites (1875), Myths and Marvels of Astronomy (1877), The Universe of Stars (1878), Treatise on the Cycloid (1878), Flowers of the Sky (1879), The Poetry of Astronomy (1880), Mysteries of Time and Space (1883), The Universe of Suns (1884), The Seasons (1885), Other Suns than Ours (1887), Old and New Astronomy (nearly completed in MS. at his death, and published 1888-90).