Astronomy was probably born in Chaldea as early as the time of Abraham. The glories of the firmament were impressed upon the minds of the rude primitive races with an intensity which we do not feel with all the triumphs of modern science. The Chaldean shepherds, as they watched their flocks by night, noted the movements of the planets, and gave names to the more brilliant constellations. Before religious rituals were established, before great superstitions arose, before poetry was sung, before musical instruments were invented, before artists sculptured marble or melted bronze, before coins were stamped, before temples arose, before diseases were healed by the arts of medicine, before commerce was known, before heroes were born, those oriental shepherds counted the hours of anxiety by the position of certain constellations. Astronomy is, therefore, the oldest of the ancient sciences, although it remained imperfect for more than four thousand years. The old Assyrians, Egyptians, and Greeks made but few discoveries which are valued by modern astronomers, but they laid the foundation of the science, and ever regarded it as one of the noblest subjects which could stimulate the faculties of man. It was invested with all that was religious and poetical.

[Sidenote: Discoveries made by oriental nations.]

The spacious level and unclouded horizon of Chaldea afforded peculiar facilities of observation; and its pastoral and contemplative inhabitants, uncontaminated by the vices and superstitions of subsequent ages, active-minded and fresh, discovered, after a long observation of eclipses—some say extending over nineteen centuries—the cycle of two hundred and twenty-three lunations, which brings back the eclipses in the same order. Having once established their cycle, they laid the foundation for the most sublime of all the sciences. Callisthenes transmitted from Babylon to Aristotle a collection of observations of all the eclipses that preceded the conquests of Alexander, together with the definite knowledge which the Chaldeans had collected about the motions of the heavenly bodies. It was rude and simple, and amounted to little beyond the fact that there were spherical revolutions about an inclined axis, and that the poles pointed always to particular stars. The Egyptians also recorded their observations, from which it would appear that they observed eclipses at least one thousand six hundred years before the commencement of our era. Nor is this improbable, if the speculations of modern philosophers respecting the age of the world are entitled to respect. The Egyptians discovered, by the rising of Sirius, that the year consists of three hundred and sixty-five and one quarter days, and this was their sacred year, in distinction from the civil, which consisted of three hundred and sixty-five days. They also had observed the courses of the planets, and could explain the phenomena of the stations and retrogradations, and it is even asserted that they regarded Mercury and Venus as satellites of the sun. Some have maintained that the obelisks which they erected served the purpose of gnomons, for determining the obliquity of the ecliptic, the altitude of the pole, and the length of the tropical year. It is thought that even the Pyramids, by the position of their sides toward the cardinal points, attest their acquaintance with a meridional line. The Chinese boast of having noticed and recorded a series of eclipses extending over a period of three thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight years, and it is probable that they anticipated the Greeks two thousand years in the discovery of the Metonic cycle, or the cycle of nineteen years, at the end of which time the new moons fall on the same days of the year. They determined the obliquity of the ecliptic, one thousand one hundred years before our era, to be 23 degrees 54' 3-15". The Indians, at a remote antiquity, represented celestial phenomena with considerable exactness, and constructed tables by which the longitude of the sun and moon are determined. Bailly thinks that astronomy was cultivated in Siam three thousand one hundred and two years before Christ, which hardly yields in accuracy to that which modern science has built on the theory of universal gravitation. The Greeks divided the heavens into constellations fourteen centuries before Christ. Thales, born 640 B.C., taught the rotundity of the earth, and that the moon shines with reflected light. He also predicted eclipses. Anaximander, born 610 B.C., invented the gnomon, and constructed geographical charts.

[Sidenote: The early Greek investigators.]

But the Greeks, after all, were the only people of antiquity who elevated astronomy to the dignity of a science. They however confessed that they derived their earliest knowledge from the Babylonian and Egyptian priests, while the priests of Thebes asserted that they were the originators of exact astronomical observations. [Footnote: Diod., i. 50.] Diodorus asserts that the Chaldeans used the Temple of Belus, in the centre of Babylon, for their survey of the heavens. [Footnote: Diod., ii. 9.] But whether the Babylonians or the Egyptians were the earliest astronomers, it is of little consequence, although the pedants make it a grave matter of investigation. All we know is, that astronomy was cultivated by both Babylonians and Egyptians, and that they made but very limited attainments. The early Greek philosophers, who visited Egypt and the East in search of knowledge, found very little to reward their curiosity or industry; not much beyond preposterous claims to a high antiquity, and an esoteric wisdom which has not yet been revealed. They approximated to the truth in reference to the solar year, by observing the equinoxes and solstices, and the heliacal rising of particular stars. Plato and Eudoxus spent thirteen years in Heliopolis for the purpose of extracting the scientific knowledge of the priests, but they learned but little beyond the fact that the solar year was a trifle beyond three hundred and sixty-five days. No great names have come down to us from the priests of Babylon or Egypt. No one gained an individual reputation. The Chaldean and Egyptian priests may have furnished the raw material of observation to the Greeks, but the latter alone possessed the scientific genius by which indigested facts were converted into a symmetrical system. The East never gave valuable knowledge to the West. It gave only superstition. Instead of astronomy, it gave astrology; instead of science, it gave magic and incantations and dreams—poison which perverted the intellect. [Footnote: Sir G. G. Lewis, Hist. of Anc. Astron., p. 293.] They connected their astronomy with divination from the stars, and made their antiquity reach back to two hundred and seventy thousand years. There were soothsayers in the time of Daniel, and magicians, exorcists, and interpreters of signs. [Footnote: Dan. i. 4, 17, 20.] They were not men of scientific research, seeking truth. It was power they sought, by perverting the intellect of the people. The astrology of the East was founded on the principle that a star or constellation presided over the birth of an individual, and either portended his fate, or shed a good or bad influence upon his future life. The star which looked upon a child at the hour of his birth, was called the horoscopus, and the peculiar influence of each planet was determined by professors of the genethliac art. The superstitions of Egypt and Chaldea unfortunately spread both among the Greeks and Romans, and these were about all that the western nations learned from the boastful priests of occult science. Whatever was known of real value among the ancients, is due to the earnest inquiries of the Greeks.

[Sidenote: Researches of the Greeks.]

And yet their researches were very unsatisfactory until the time of Hipparchus. The primitive knowledge, until Thales, was almost nothing. The Homeric poems regarded the earth as a circular plain, bounded by the heaven, which was a solid vault or hemisphere, with its concavity turned downwards. And this absurdity was believed until the time of Herodotus, five centuries after; nor was it exploded fully in the time of Aristotle. The sun, moon, and stars, were supposed to move upon, or with, the inner surface of the heavenly hemisphere, and the ocean was thought to gird the earth around as a great belt, into which the heavenly bodies sunk at their setting. [Footnote: Il., vii. 422; Od., iii. i. xix. 433.] Homer believed that the sun arose out of the ocean, ascending the heaven, and again plunging into the ocean, passing under the earth, and producing darkness. [Footnote: Il. viii. 485.] The Greeks even personified the sun as a divine charioteer driving his fiery steeds over the steep of heaven, until he bathed them at evening in the western waves. Apollo became the god of the sun, as Diana was the goddess of the moon. But the early Greek inquirers did not attempt to explain how the sun found his way from the west back again to the east. They merely took note of the diurnal course, the alternation of day and night, the number of the seasons, and their regular successions. They found the points of the compass by determining the recurrence of the equinoxes and solstices; but they had no conception of the ecliptic—of that great circle in the heaven, formed by the sun's annual course, and of its obliquity when compared with the equator. Like the Egyptians and Babylonians, they ascertained the length of the year to be three hundred and sixty-five days; but perfect accuracy was wanting for want of scientific instruments, and of recorded observations of the heavenly bodies. The Greeks had not even a common chronological era for the designation of years. Thus Herodotus informs us that the Trojan War preceded his time by eight hundred years: [Footnote: Il, ii. 53.] he merely states the interval between the event in question and his own time; he had certain data for distant periods. Thus the Greeks reckoned dates from the Trojan War, and the Romans from the building of their city. And they divided the year into twelve months, and introduced the intercalary circle of eight years, although the Romans disused it afterwards until the calendar was reformed by Julius Caesar. Thus there was no scientific astronomical knowledge worth mentioning among the primitive Greeks.

Immense research and learning have been expended by modern critics, to show the state of scientific astronomy among the Greeks. I am equally amazed at the amount of research, and its comparative worthlessness, for what addition to science can be made by an enumeration of the puerilities and errors of the Greeks, and how wasted and pedantic the learning which ransacks all antiquity to prove that the Greeks adopted this or that absurdity. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote relocated to chapter end.]

[Sidenote: Thales.]

[Sidenote: Anaximander and Anaximenes.]