ndred years before the beginning of our era,--which is not improbable,
if the speculations of modern philosophers respecting the age of the
world are entitled to credit. 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 asserted too
that they regarded Mercury and Venus as satellites of the sun. Some have
maintained that the obelisks which the Egyptians 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
even that the Pyramids, by the position of their sides toward the
cardinal points, attest Egyptian acquaintance with a meridional line.
The Chinese boast of having noticed and recorded a series of eclipses
extending over a period of thirty-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. The Chinese also determined the obliquity of the ecliptic eleven
hundred years before our era. The Hindus at a remote antiquity
represented celestial phenomena with considerable exactness, and
constructed tables by which the longitude of the sun and moon were
determined, and dials to measure time. Bailly thinks that thirty-one
hundred and two years before Christ astronomy was cultivated in Siam
which hardly yields in accuracy to that which modern science has built
on the theory of universal gravitation.

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 claimed to be the originators of
exact astronomical observations. Diodorus asserts that the Chaldaeans
used the Temple of Belus, in the centre of Babylon, for their survey of
the heavens. But whether the Babylonians or the Egyptians were the
earliest astronomers is of little consequence, although the pedants make
it a grave matter of investigation. All we know is that as