Note.

The sky appears to us like an arch, embracing all our lives, Dante says.[5] From the dawn of intelligence man must have recognized his dependence upon the all-embracing heavens, especially the sun, without which life would be impossible. The consciousness expressed itself in many ways: in adoration of the sky, the sun, moon, and hosts of heaven; in superstitious fear which regarded events on earth as directly controlled by the heavenly bodies; in careful watching and recording of their movements for useful purposes. Thus, long before astronomy became an exact science, and was studied simply for its own sake, patient observers had laid the foundations, and were familiar with many of the movements we have been describing.

These are of great importance to primitive man. Sun, moon, and stars are invaluable as guides, especially at sea, and we know that the ancient Greek mariners used to steer their ships by observations of the Great Bear, while the Phoenicians preferred to use the Little Bear for this purpose. But the strongest and most universal incentive to careful and prolonged study of the skies is our complete dependence upon them for the measurement of time.

In the earliest period of their history, the Jews, the Greeks, and probably every other nation, divided the day simply into morning, noon, and evening, according as the sun was rising, or apparently stationary, or sinking, with regard to the horizon; and the passage of some bright stars indicated the time at night. But at a very early period the first of all astronomical instruments was invented, by which the sun’s varying height can be measured: hence the time of noon, the dates of equinoxes and solstices, and the length of the solar year can be determined. The gnomon in its simplest form is a pole set up vertically on a smooth level surface, on which its shadow as cast by the sun can be observed. The moment of shortest shadow marks the middle of the day, the shortest midday shadow marks the summer solstice, the longest the winter solstice, the equinoxes falling between. The instrument also indicates the points of the compass, for the sun is always due south in northern latitudes at midday: hence the Latin word meridies (French midi) means south as well as midday, and the Meridian in astronomy is a line which passes through the north and south points and the zenith, and is crossed by the sun at midday.

The gnomon was said to have been introduced into Greece by Anaximander about 600 b.c., and the Babylonians claimed to be the inventors, but it was probably invented independently by several races. The Chinese certainly observed the length of the shadow more than two thousand years b.c., and the very interesting fact has recently come to light that a tribe in a hitherto unexplored part of Borneo use such an instrument, invented by themselves. They set up a post about 6 ft. high, and throw over the top a piece of string weighted at each end to show when it is vertical; the length of the shadow cast by the post is measured with a notched stick. By this means they tell the time of day; and they also observe the sun (presumably with the gnomon) to know the right season for planting their rice.[6]

However rough the first gnomon may have been, its importance can scarcely be overrated, for it introduced measurement and calculation into observation of the sun’s movements, and it is the ancestor of our modern sextants, transit telescopes, and other instruments of precision.

It was also the beginning of the sundial. The course followed by the moving end of the shadow was traced on the ground, and divided into equal parts: hence arose the custom which the Greeks adopted from the Babylonians of counting twelve hours in every day, from sunrise to sunset, and twelve hours in every night, from sunset to sunrise, regardless of the varying lengths of day and night at different seasons. This is known as the system of “temporary hours.” If we used it in England, the twelve hours of a midsummer day would take twice as long to pass as the twelve fleeting hours of a midsummer night; but in Greece the inequality is much less, and in the latitudes of Babylonia it is never striking. The skill and knowledge of the Greeks enabled them, later on, to construct dials of different kinds, which marked “equal hours,” such as we use now; but the system of “temporary hours” did not altogether die out till after the invention of pendulum clocks in the 17th century of our era.

Clepsydras, or water-clocks, were also used in Egypt and Babylonia, and ancient Greece; and there is still a large one in Canton, where a reservoir is placed in a tower, and the water falling, drop by drop, into a receiver whose depth is marked in figures on the wall, indicates the passing of time just as sand does in running through an hour-glass. These clocks cannot have kept very good time, however, or they would have been more used by the Babylonian and Greek astronomers who took pains to ascertain the exact positions of the stars. Owing to the diurnal revolution of the skies, the time at which any celestial body rises or crosses the meridian after another is an index of their distance apart, east and west on the sphere, and this is how it is reckoned by modern astronomers. But the ancients seem to have been never able to trust their clepsydras sufficiently to use this method, and only referred to them for approximate time.

The gnomon, valuable as it is for marking the sun’s daily course, and the north and south part of his yearly motion, is a limited instrument. It cannot show his westerly motion on the sphere, nor is it of any use for the planets. To trace these motions, and the monthly journey of the moon, the first step is to distinguish the stars, by grouping and naming them, especially those which lie in the path of sun, moon, and planets. The invention of some kind of zodiac is probably older even than the invention of the gnomon, and also originated independently among different races. The germ of the idea may be found to-day among races low in the scale of civilization. The Australian aborigines are familiar with that unique star-cluster which we call the Pleiades, and know that its appearances and disappearances are periodical and coincide with the seasons. A Queensland tribe, for instance, has a legend in which the stars figure as six sisters who have been transported to the skies, and it is said that they sometimes appear before the sun in order to throw down icicles, an evident allusion to the fact that the Pleiades begin to appear just before sunrise in May, the Australian winter. The natives of Tahiti divide their year into “Matarii i nia” and “Matarii i raro,” which means Pleiades Above and Pleiades Below (i.e. the horizon at the beginning of night). Sir Norman Lockyer has shown that the mysterious alignments of stones found at Stonehenge, Carnac, and other places, may have been so arranged in order to show the direction, some of the sun at his rising on certain dates, notably the morning of the summer solstice, and some of the Pleiades or other striking stars, whose rising just before the sun would enable ancient astronomers to fix the dates of important festivals.

Such observations as these, of which many instances might be drawn from many parts of the world, are first steps towards studying the whole path of the sun through the stars, and of forming a calendar with a name or number for every day in the year. Until the stars are known, and a calendar fixed, the motions of sun and moon cannot be learned in detail, the planets can scarcely be distinguished from the stars and from one another, and there are no settled dates from which to calculate their periods.

The first zodiac of which we have written record is a lunar one of 28 constellations, which is referred to in the “Canon of the Emperor Yaou,” a Chinese emperor who began to reign in b.c. 2356. “Yaou commanded He and Ho, in reverend accordance with their observation of the wide heavens, to calculate and delineate the movements and appearances of the sun, the moon, the stars, and the zodiacal spaces, and so to deliver respectfully the seasons to the people.” That these astronomers studied “the movements and appearances” of the sun by means of the gnomon as well as observations of the stars is plain from what follows, where directions are given for determining the solstices. One astronomer was commanded by the Emperor to “reside at Nankeaou and arrange the transformations of the summer, and respectfully to observe the extreme limit of the shadow. The day, he said, is at its longest, and the star is Ho: you may thus exactly determine midsummer.” Ho (= fire) is the fiery red Antares in Scorpio. The star of the winter solstice, when “the day is at its shortest” was Maou, which is the Pleiades. Directions are also given for observing the spring and autumn equinoxes, when day and night are of medium length, and certain other stars are to be observed.[7]

The Hindus had also a lunar Zodiac, but with only 27 constellations, and the Arabs had their 28 “Mansions of the Moon.” These 27 or 28 asterisms were evidently suggested by the moon’s sidereal period of 27¼ days. But her synodical period, i.e. her revolution with regard to the sun, in which she runs through her phases, is much more convenient for marking a period of time for general uses, and this month of about 30 days has been almost universally adopted by primitive peoples, the first day being counted when the crescent new moon begins to be seen after sunset. From this custom arose another, that of counting the beginning of the day from sunset, but in various times and places other starting-points have been chosen—sunrise, midday, or midnight.

Twelve of these synodical lunar months are nearly equal to one solar year, and this doubtless suggested the solar zodiac of twelve constellations, each constellation marking the portion of sky passed over by the sun in a month. The Chinese “Yellow Path of the Sun” contained twelve animals, the Mouse, Cow, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Serpent, Horse, Ram, Ape, Hen, Dog, and Pig. These animals were widely adopted by other nations—the Koreans and the Japanese, the Mongols of Tibet, the Tartars, and the Turks.

Another zodiac, however, was destined to have an even wider popularity, spreading, in the course of centuries, from Greece to Arabia, Persia, India, and China, where it finally superseded the native constellations; it crossed the Mediterranean into Africa, conquered the whole of Europe, and is used to-day over the whole civilised world.

The names of these twelve zodiacal constellations are familiar to us all:—

Strange to say, we cannot tell with any certainty where, when, or by whom, this ancient series of constellations was devised and named. The earliest full description which we possess is by a Greek poet of the 4th century b.c., Aratus. A line from the prologue to his “Phenomena” was quoted by St. Paul in his address to the Athenians on Mars’ Hill.

But Aratus did not know who had invented the names of the star-groups which he describes. “Some man of yore,” he supposes,

It is, to say the least, exceedingly doubtful, whether the naming of star-groups was so promptly carried out by one individual, especially as Aratus’ poem includes, besides the twelve zodiacal constellations, thirty-six others, which contain all the bright stars of the sky except those too far south to be seen in the temperate regions of our northern hemisphere. The spaces thus left blank were afterwards filled up, chiefly in the 17th and 18th centuries of our era, and the regions round the South Pole are now crowded with a mixture of birds and scientific instruments; but the names and the figures of the traditional forty-eight constellations still find undisputed places on our globes and star-maps.

Some of these figures are very strange and suggestive. We have a maiden with wings, a centaur shooting arrows, a flying horse, a water-snake with a crow and a cup on its back, a charioteer with a goat on his shoulder, a man strangling a serpent, another pouring water into the mouth of a fish, and a strange beast like a goat with a fish’s tail. All had their meaning, doubtless, to their originators, but to us they are cryptic characters, hard to decipher. Among the zodiacal constellations only one is obvious, Libra the Scales, the sign in which the sun is when days and nights are perfectly balanced in length; but this is comparatively recent, for Aratus and his contemporaries give in its place the Claws of the Scorpion, the latter being an enormous monster extending over the space of two asterisms. The figures may have been religious symbols, or an illustration of some myth concerning the sun’s yearly course, or each of the twelve may have indicated the weather or the occupation suitable to the month it represented. The ear of corn in the hand of the Virgin, and the juxtaposition of three watery figures in Capricornus, Aquarius, and Pisces, suggest the latter explanation. Many different ideas probably played a part in the origin of these mysterious constellation-forms. The Greeks, and after them the Romans, when adopting the old constellations, sometimes adopted also the old myths which still clung about them; sometimes they ascribed legends to them from their own mythology. Thus, the kneeling figure with his foot upon a dragon, became and remains the hero Hercules, although Aratus only describes him as a man toiling at some unknown task, and says he is called simply the Kneeler. Successive generations of astronomers altered some of the figures, but probably only to a slight extent.[11]

The poem of Aratus enjoyed an immense popularity in classical times and throughout the Middle Ages, and no doubt helped to stereotype the forms whose origin was already forgotten when he wrote. He was not an astronomer, however, and the poem is only a popular paraphrase of a lost work by Eudoxus. This Greek astronomer had lived a hundred years earlier, and it is thought that he himself copied from an older source. The attempt to discover this source has been the object of many ingenious conjectures, and much research among ancient monuments and writings. Some of the old constellations are met with in Isaiah and Job, in Homer, on tablets found at Nineveh, and an immense antiquity is sometimes claimed for them. Dupuis, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, thought he had conclusively proved that the figures of the zodiac were designed in Egypt 15,000 years ago![12] Miss Plunkett, in her “Ancient Calendars and Constellations” assigns them to the seventh millenium before Christ.

An ingenious theory, suggested independently by Schwartz and Proctor, and developed by Mr. E. W. Maunder,[13] is founded on an examination of the space round the South Pole which was left blank by the ancient constellation designers. From its extent, Proctor concluded that they cannot have seen further south than about 40° from the South Pole, and therefore that they must have lived in a latitude of about 40° north of the equator (say, central Asia or Asia Minor); from the position of its centre, which must have been the Pole, he concluded that the date was about b.c. 2200. For the centre of the circular patch seems to lie near the star Delta Hydri, which was the South Pole star at that time. (This movement of the Pole among the stars, due to “precession,” will be explained later). This date does not differ much from that found by Robert Brown, from the position of the celestial equator among the stars, as described by Aratus; he says b.c. 2084.[14] Schwartz gave b.c. 1400; Mr. Maunder, from additional considerations of the positions of various constellation figures, says that they must all have been originally designed about b.c. 2800.

Unfortunately the descriptions of Aratus are neither very precise nor consistent with one another, and he is our oldest and our main authority for the forms and positions of the ancient constellations.[15] It may, however, be taken as practically certain that they had been designed many centuries before he wrote, and that the Greeks received them from the Babylonians. Orion and the Pleiades, the Great Bear and Arcturus, and perhaps many others, were familiarly known in the Levant as early as the tenth century before Christ; and we find traces of our zodiac, or its beginnings, in Babylonia at least as early as the eleventh. It is always to Egyptians and Babylonians that the Greeks referred as their predecessors and teachers in astronomy, but the native constellations of Egypt seem to have been different, and so far as we know at present the Babylonians began earlier and made greater progress in star-lore than any other nation before Greece. The latest results of expert investigation of astronomical tablets discovered in the ancient clay libraries of Babylonia and Assyria, tend to show that astronomy was of native growth there, and developed very slowly.[16] Star-worship and the need for a calendar led their inhabitants to observe the skies thousands of years ago; but their early work was naturally vague and rude.

This star-worship and star-study seems to have been learned by the Semitic Babylonians, and their descendants and rivals the Assyrians, from a race with whom they met and mingled in the grey dawn of history, but whose existence was unknown to us before the middle of last century.

This people, who belonged to a totally distinct family of nations, and are known to us now as Sumerians, had settled near the mouth of the Persian Gulf, when it ran further inland than it does now, and more than five thousand years ago used a kind of writing on soft stones (later, on bricks) which had obviously arisen from some form of picture writing, and ultimately developed into cuneiform. Their reverence for the heavenly bodies is shown by the fact that the familiar star sign, which appears on very early Sumerian inscriptions, denotes their word for god or lord, and on the monuments of Babylonia and Assyria we meet constantly the triple sign This, we learn from the inscriptions, stood for three great deities, the Moon-god, the Sun-god, and the goddess of the planet Venus. Our illustration shows an inscription in early Babylonian script, and a scene which represents the vassal of a king of Ur (Abraham’s “Ur of the Chaldees”) being led into the presence of the Moon-god.[17] It is believed to date from about b.c. 2400. The Babylonians were an intensely superstitious people, and a large part of their omens were drawn from observations of the skies. Every city from this period onward had its ziggurat or great tower formed of several superimposed cubes, usually seven in number, diminishing in size and probably crowned by the shrine of the local deity. It is not certain what purposes were served by these towers, but the successive platforms may well have been the observatories from which the Babylonian priests, gazing through the clear air and over the level plains, watched, year after year, and century after century, eclipses of sun and moon, risings and settings of stars and planets, and all the changing pageant of the skies, which to them were eloquent of peace and prosperity, or of war and misfortunes in their land.

Although this illusory art chiefly occupied the early Babylonian astronomers, they made some observations of real value, and gradually acquired true knowledge concerning the movements of the heavenly bodies.

Tablets a few centuries older than the Chinese Canon of Yaou containing lists of the Sumerian names of twelve months, show that this people had established a luni-solar year. Fortunately for the progress of astronomy the year does not contain an exact number of months, or even of days: at the end of twelve lunar months, a few more days and hours must elapse before the sun has returned to his original place among the stars, and before the round of the seasons is completed. Therefore the first rough approximation had to be constantly corrected if calendar festivals were to recur at the same seasons; and thus the priests, who in early times were usually the calendar makers and keepers, became gradually better and better acquainted with the movements of sun and moon, and the appearance of star-groups. It is interesting to compare the different ways in which various races have solved the problem of calendar-formation.

The Chinese had a year of twelve months, and added an intercalary month occasionally, in such a way that the average length of the year was brought up to 366 days. The written character for “intercalary” in both Chinese and Japanese is a compound of the characters for “gate” and “Emperor,” because in ancient days the Emperor used to perform the ceremonies proper to each of the twelve months in the special room of his palace dedicated to that month, but in the intercalary month he performed them in the doorway of the palace.

The Egyptians and the Arabs seem to have given up the attempt to harmonize the two periods, though both of these nations reckoned twelve months in their years. The Egyptians counted thirty days to each month, and added five days more at the end of the twelfth, so that the months can have had no connection with the moon: the year had, in fact, been calculated from the position of the sun among the stars, beginning with the morning on which Sirius rose just before it. This “heliacal rising” of Sirius heralded the great event of their year, the overflow of the Nile. The Arab year, on the contrary, was purely lunar, for it consisted of twelve months which were alternately of twenty-nine and thirty days: they therefore corresponded pretty closely with the moon’s phases, but had no connection with the sun or the seasons. The Mahomedans still use this lunar year.

The new moon festivals of the Hebrews prove that the moon was important to their calendar, but the three chief feasts of First-fruits, of Ingathering, and of the Passover, were so closely connected with the seasons that their year must have been luni-solar. It consisted of twelve months, one of which was sometimes doubled, but how they decided when this was necessary is nowhere described in the Old Testament. Some think, that as an offering of first-fruits was to be made on a certain day of a certain month, the month preceding it was doubled in every year in which it was evident that the crops would not be far enough advanced for the first-fruits to be gathered so soon: in this way no direct observations had to be made of the sun’s movements, but the year was accommodated to them by observations of the seasons.[18]

The Babylonian calendar is the most interesting of all, for it was the most intimately connected with star-observation. At first an extra month seems to have been added to the usual twelve, in an irregular way, whenever found necessary, judging by a tablet of the great king Hammurabi, who united all the cities of southern Babylonia under one rule, and gave them the famous Code of Laws, communicated to him by the Sun-god. The tablet runs as follows:—

“Thus saith Hammurabi: the year having gone wrong, let the coming month be registered by the name of Ululu the second. And instead of the payment of taxes being made on the 25th day of Tasritsu, let it be made on the 25th day of Ululu the second.”

Hammurabi reigned about b.c. 2200. A thousand years or more after this, we find that royal decrees for correcting the calendar were never necessary, for the astronomers had invented more than one system for keeping the year right. One of these was to observe, like the Egyptians, the heliacal rising of certain stars. The little group of three stars in the head of the Ram, which we call Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Arietis, was found very convenient for this purpose. When it rose just before the sun in the month Nisan, the observers knew that all the twelve months would fall in their right seasons, but when it remained invisible (hidden in the morning twilight) until the following month, the calendar was evidently running ahead of the sun, and that year was lengthened by adding a thirteenth month. This is the meaning of the directions given on a tablet now in the British Museum:—

“The asterism Dilgan[19] rises heliacally in the month of Nisan. Whenever this asterism remains invisible, let its month be forgotten,”

that is, let it be taken over again, as if it had not already been counted. Similar directions are given for some other asterisms and their corresponding months. But a second method, which was peculiar, so far as we know, to the Babylonians, was that of using the moon as a pointer to indicate the place of the sun. Whereas the sun’s place among the stars can only be inferred, the moon’s can be plainly seen, and her phase indicates her distance from the sun at any time. A tablet of unknown date, belonging to the last millenium before our era, or a little earlier, gives the following directions:—

“When on the first day of the month of Nisan the asterism Mulmul (the Pleiades)[20] and the Moon are seen together, the year will be normal. When on the third day of Nisan the asterism Mulmul and the Moon are together, the year will be full” (that is, will contain 13 months).

Each Babylonian month began when the new moon was first visible after sunset; if at this moment she was seen with the Pleiades, it is clear that the sun, which had just set, was not far west of the cluster; if however, it was not till the moon was three days old that she was seen with the Pleiades, she would then be some distance above the horizon at sunset: consequently the sun was some distance west of the Pleiades. In this case he would also be west of Dilgan, the Ram’s Head, so those stars would rise after him in the morning, and be hidden in his light: therefore, both the morning and the evening observation combined to show that his course was not completed, and that the year must be lengthened by the addition of an extra month.

Several lists of stars and star-groups indicating the months in this way have been found, the early lists containing only a few, the later twelve. If our zodiac originated with the Babylonians, there is little doubt the idea took its rise from these monthly stars, but it is not possible, with our present knowledge, to say when these old astronomers first linked the isolated stars into a continuous series of twelve star-groups and connected the idea of the month with the invisible group among which the sun was known to be shining, instead of with the stars seen east or west of him, or in conjunction with the crescent moon.[21]

A Scorpion with immense claws, and a Goat with fishes’ scales appear several times on monuments at least as old as 1000 b.c. and it is very probable, although this fact alone would not prove it, that they were then used as constellation figures. It has been definitely proved from inscriptions that before 600 b.c. the name of Scorpion was applied to some stars of our present Scorpion, that there was a Lion corresponding with ours, and the principal star in that asterism, which was called “The King” by Greeks and Romans (Basiliskos and Regulus), bore a name with the same meaning in Babylonia; the Celestial Bull seems to have been the group of the Hyades, and the Great Twins were the two stars Castor and Pollux. The last two identifications seem to show how the single stars or small groups of the monthly lists were expanded into the large zodiacal constellations, for the Hyades cluster is in our present Bull, and Castor and Pollux are in our Twins.

Under the great Assyrian kings who in the 8th and 7th centuries b.c. made Nineveh the capital of their empire, Babylonian astronomy flourished exceedingly, and it made much progress through all the political changes which followed, until the beginning of our era. The motions, phases, and eclipses of the moon were carefully studied and could be accurately predicted, the positions of many stars were determined; the zodiac was divided into twelve equal spaces, which afterwards became 36 by sub-division (the constellations being too unequal in size for convenience); and finally the whole circle was marked out in 360 degrees. The movements of all the naked eye planets were well understood, their positions being constantly compared with those of a number of standard stars, mostly in the zodiac; and after watching and recording these for a number of years the astronomers were able to calculate where each planet would be found at future dates. Tables have been found on clay tablets of the 2nd century b.c. predicting the heliacal risings and settings, and the stations and retrogressions etc., with considerable accuracy.

When astronomy had reached this stage of accurate prediction, it was no longer in its infancy, but was fairly on its way to become a true science.[22]

Nevertheless, the astronomy of the Babylonians, advanced as it was, seems never to have progressed beyond the empirical stage. With them, there seems to have been no desire to group the facts they so patiently and skilfully collected into a system, and form a theory to explain them.

And this must be said of other ancient nations also. The Egyptians made careful observations, especially of the heliacal risings of different stars, by means of which they determined the length of the year, as we have already mentioned, and oriented their temples and pyramids. They worshipped the sun in all his aspects, and their astrology so much resembles the Babylonian that it is believed to have been derived from it. The Babylonians seem to have been more interested in the planets than any other nation of antiquity, but they were known also in other countries. The Chinese recorded comets, and all races were greatly interested in eclipses, which they were able to predict with some accuracy, having discovered that they occur in cycles. Yet we find no more rational attempt to explain these phenomena than the Hindu legend of a great dragon that attacks the sun, or the Egyptian story of a sow that swallows the moon; and their cosmogonies can only be regarded as poetical descriptions or survivals of early childlike notions of the universe.

The Hindu world resting on the back of an elephant, and that on a tortoise, is no doubt but an allegory. The Egyptians pictured the earth as a great parallelogram, long from north to south but narrow from east to west, like their own land, with the sky over it, upheld by huge pillars or lofty mountains. The stars were set in this domed lid of the world, but sun, moon, and planets were floating each in its own boat on a great celestial river which ran just below the summits of the mountains, and whose course was hidden towards the north. The bark of the sun came nearer to Egypt in the summer, because at that time the celestial river overflowed its usual bank, like the Nile. The red Doshiri was said to sail backwards, referring no doubt to the retrograde movement of Mars.

In Eridu, one of the oldest cities of southern Babylonia, on the Persian Gulf, the great abyss of the ocean was looked upon as the origin of all things, and it was believed that it encircled the earth like a great river. Later on, we find the world described as a great mountain, resting on the watery deep, and under the mountain is the abode of the dead. It is entered from the west, which surely was suggested by the setting of the heavenly bodies in the west. The vaulted sky above the earth has divisions: the rim of the lowest part rests upon the supporting watery deep; above it are the upper waters (the source of rain); and above this again is the dwelling-place of the celestials. The sun issues forth each morning from a door in the upper heaven, or from the mount of sunrise, and enters another heavenly door, or the sunset mountain, at night.

The similarity to these Babylonian ideas of the Hebrew “firmament,” the “waters above the firmament,” and the “of the great deep,” in the book of Genesis,[23] and Ezekiel’s “Sheol” in “the nether parts of the earth,”[24] has often been noted.

To sum up:—

If we include as astronomy any observation of the heavenly bodies which leads to a recognition of order and periodicity in their movements and a power of forecasting their positions, then every race and age has had its astronomers, rough though their methods may be at first. With growing civilization more refined methods are used; the gnomon is invented for studying the movements of the sun; the changing positions of moon and planets are noted by means of certain stars; finally, all the visible stars are grouped into constellations, and it is recognized that a great band of star-groups crosses the sky, which forms the pathway alike of sun, moon, and planets; the length of the month and of the year are determined more or less accurately, and when an unvarying calendar has been formed, the celestial cycles can be better recorded and studied. But in all this there is as yet no scientific motive properly so called, no curiosity regarding the phenomena for the simple pleasure of knowing and understanding them, no attempt to group them into a system or to explain their underlying causes. The primitive idea that the heavenly bodies exist for the convenience of earth-dwellers is illustrated by the Egyptian hieroglyph for night, which consists of the sign for sky combined with a star suspended like a lamp; the other idea that they are mysterious divinities is shown by the Babylonian star-sign for a god or king, . The ancients found that the stars were of great use, especially for measuring periods of time; they recognised also in them a marvellous order and regularity, of which they dreamed that they found an echo on earth, and endeavoured to divine the future by watching the skies. Can we doubt that they were also attracted by the beauty that calls all men through all ages to lift their eyes and look upward?

HYMN TO THE SETTING SUN.

Sung by the Priests of Babylon.