Caption: An imaginative portrait of Sir Christopher Wren (1632--1723): anatomist, architect, astronomer, fellow of the Royal Society (elected 1663), mathematician, polymath, physicist, scientist.

Christopher Wren is overwhelmingly most famous as the architect who built St. Paul's Cathedral, London ...

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, "I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul's.

---Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875--1956).

... where he is buried: "Reader, if you seek his monument---look around you" (Wikipedia: Christopher Wren: Death: 1723 Feb25: Epitaph).

Somewhat humorously, Christopher Wren regretted pursuing architecture instead of astronomy:

Hence it was, that in the latter part of his life, he has been often heard to complain; that King Charles the 2nd (Charles II (1630--1685)): had done him a disservice in taking him from the pursuit of those studies, and obliging him to spend all his time in rubbish; (the expression he had for building:) for, had he been permitted to have follow'd the Profession of Physick (usually meaning medicine, but probably meaning astronomy here), in all probability he might have provided much better for his family.
---quotation from Robert I McLachlan 2019, arXiv:1909.02167, p. 2.

Christopher Wren has the remarkable achievement in cosmology of being the first person in the historical record to speculate that nebulae (historical usage) were other galaxies:

... a Time would come, when Men should be able to stretch out their Eyes as Snails do, & extend them to fifty feet in length; by which means, they should be able to discover Two thousand Times as many Stars as we can; and find the Galaxy (i.e., Milky Way) to be Myriads of them; and every nebulous Star appearing as if it were the Firmanment of some other World, at an incomprehensible Distance, bury'd in the vast Abyss of intermundious Vacuum ...
---1657 quotation from Robert I McLachlan 2019, arXiv:1909.02167, p. 3.

The term firmanment in pre-17th-century usage was a sort of synonym for celestial sphere of the stars of Aristotelian cosmology. However, Christopher Wren is stretching the meaning to what we would call a galaxy.

Christopher Wren's suggestion of other galaxies had NO impact on the historical evolution of astronomy, but it is a mark of his genius---Christopher Wren, one of the firstborn of the Age of Reason.

Credit/Permission: © David Jeffery, 2013 / Own work.
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