Cornelis Easton

Easton was born in Dordrecht where his father Johannes Jacobus was a captain in the Dutch East India Company and his mother Margrieta Wilhelmina was the daughter of a printer.

He was greatly influenced by Jules Verne's Journey to the Moon and Popular Astronomy by Nicolas-Camille Flammarion (1842-1925).

This led to his 1893 book La Voie Lactee dans l'hemisphere boreal, in which he provided drawing and diagrams of the Milky Way and suggested a spiral structure for stellar system.

He also published several other works on galaxies and nebulae, which led to an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Groningen in 1903 on the recommendation of Jacobus Cornelis Kapteyn (1851-1922).

His book Les hivers dans l'Europe occidentale, (1928) was a statistical study of climate in Western Europe which suggested a 89-year cycle of severe winters.