[132] In the twelfth century, B.C., Thschen-li records a measurement of the solstitial shadow, which La Place found accordant with the theory of the alteration of the obliquity of the Ecliptic. Cosmos.
The Babylonian astronomical observations sent by Callisthenes to Greece, have been calculated by Simplicius to extend back 1903 years before Alexander the Great.
Mr. Colebrooke has settled the date of one of the Vedas to be the fourteenth century B.C., by the place given to the solstitial points in a calendar appended to it.
“That the planets and their courses, the comets and theirs, that gravitation and repulsion were perfectly familiar to the priests of Memphis, though unknown to, or rather repudiated by, the most learned and philosophical of the Greeks, cannot to-day be questioned. They know the milky way to be composed of fixed stars, and the sun to be a fixed star.”—Drummond’s Origines, b. iv. c. 6; b. vii. c. 8.
“Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the French astronomers found with surprise that there existed in Siam a mode of calculating eclipses by successive operations worked with numbers apparently arbitrary. The key of this method has been long lost.”—Occult Sciences, vol. i. p. 191.
[133] Unless the words of Rabelais are to stand for the precocious discrimination of his age:—“Qu’est devenu l’art d’evoquer des cieux la foudre et le feu céleste, jadis enseigné par le sage Prométhée?”
[134] “Guided by Numa’s books, Tullius used the same ceremonies, but through inaccuracy (parum ritè) he perished, struck by the lightning.”—Lucius Piso apud Pliny, Hist. Nat. 1. xxviii. cap. 11. Livy uses the expression pravâ religione.
[135] “Fulmineo periit imitator fulminis ictu.”—Ovid. Metam. 1. xiv. v. 617.
[136] Suidas, verbo “Zoroaster.” See also Müller.
[137] This word is found in the pharanks or dictionaries of the Persians, and is described as the iron-attracting stone. It is mentioned in the Talmud. It was known to the Hindoos, as it was to the Greeks and Romans.