James Gall was a Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 clergyman who founded the Carrubbers Close Mission. As well as writing on religious matters, often from a rather unorthodox standpoint, he had an interest in astronomy

Astronomy

Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...

. It was his Easy Guide to the Constellations and his People's Atlas of the Stars that brought him to people's attention.

Religious views

Most of Gall's work on religion was detailed in a book called The Stars and the Angels in which he not only argues for the existence of other inhabited planet

Planet

A planet is a celestial body orbiting a star or stellar remnant that is massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, is not massive enough to cause thermonuclear fusion, and has cleared its neighbouring region of planetesimals.The term planet is ancient, with ties to history, science,...

s but describes the view that Gabriel

Gabriel

In Abrahamic religions, Gabriel is an Archangel who typically serves as a messenger to humans from God.He first appears in the Book of Daniel, delivering explanations of Daniel's visions. In the Gospel of Luke Gabriel foretells the births of both John the Baptist and of Jesus...

 would have had on his way from heaven to earth to tell Mary that she would have a baby next Christmas

Christmas

Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days...

.

A rare, but important, work by Gall is "The Synagogue Not the Temple, the Germ and Model of the Christian Church", published in 1890. It discusses the foundation upon which the Christian Church is modeled.

Astronomy

Gall's main work as an astronomer was with the constellations. As part of this work he developed the Gall orthographic projection, a derivative of the Lambert Cylindrical Equal-Area, to project the celestial sphere onto flat paper in a manner that avoided distorting the shapes of the constellations. He also applied this technique to terrestrial mapmaking as a way to make a flat map of the round Earth. It was re-invented by Arno Peters

Arno Peters

Arno Peters developed the Peters world map, based on the Gall–Peters projection.Born in Berlin, Germany, he began his career as a filmmaker who studied American techniques of filmmaking during the late 1930s, and helped to revolutionize film production in Germany at the time...

 in 1967 and adopted by organisations such as UNESCO

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

.

Alphabet

Gall's father, James Gall the Elder (1784-1874), designed a "triangular alphabet"

Tactile alphabets for the blind

A tactile alphabet is a system for writing material that the blind can read by touch. While currently the Braille system is the most popular and some materials have been prepared in Moon type, historically there have been a large number of other tactile alphabets:*Systems based on embossed Roman...

used for embossed books for blind people.