n in Egypt, and that
they were engraved less deeply upon the heart of the nation.

The belief in sorcery never died out in Chaldaea; up to the very last days
of antiquity it never lost its empire at least over the lower orders of the
people. As time passed on the priests joined the practice of astrology to
that of magic. How the transition took place may readily be understood. The
magician began by seeking for incantations sufficiently powerful to compel
not only the vulgar crowd of genii to obedience, but also those who, in the
shape of stars great and small, inhabited the celestial spaces and revealed
themselves to man by the brilliance of their fires. Supposing him to be
well skilled in his art his success would be beyond doubt so far as his
clients were concerned.

Many centuries after the birth of this singular delusion even the Greeks
and Romans did not refuse to believe that magic formulae had sometimes the
powers claimed for them. "Incantation," cries an abandoned lover in Virgil,
"may bring down the very moon from the sky:"

"_Carmina vel caelo possunt deducere lunam._"[90]

Although simple minds allowed themselves to believe that such prodigies
were not quite impossible, skilled men could not have failed to see that in
spite of the appeals addressed to them by priests and magicians, neither
sun nor moon had ever quitted their place in the firmament or interrupted
their daily course. As the hope of influencing the action of the stars died
away, the wish to study their motions grew stronger. In the glorious nights
of Chaldaea the splendour of the sky stirred the curiosity as well as the
admiration of mankind, and the purity of the air made observation easy.
Here and there, in the more thickly inhabited and best irrigated parts of
the plain, gentle mists floated over the earth at certain periods, but they
were no real hindrance to observation. To escape them but a slight
elevation above the plain was required. Let the observer raise himself a
few feet above the tallest palm trees, and no cloud interposed to prevent
his eyes from travelling from the fires that blazed in the zenith to the
paler stars that lay clustered upon the horizon. There were no accidents of
the ground by which the astronomer could lift himself above the smoke of
cities or the mists hanging over the lakes and canals, and to make up for
their absence the massive and many-storied towers which men began to
construct as soon as they underst