i 7 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



British Museum, which, through the politeness of Mr. R. H. Major, 

 I had the pleasure of inspecting in 1874. It embraces treatises on his- 

 tory, astronomy, geography, religion, morality, astrology, and other 

 subjects. From one of these books, compiled after the manner of our 

 modern encyclopaedias, and the compilation of which is shown to have 

 been made more than 2,000 years b. c, it has been ascertained, what 

 has long been supposed, that Chaldea was the parent-land of astrono- 

 my ; for it is found, from this compilation and from other bricks, that 

 the Babylonians catalogued the stars, and distinguished and named 

 the constellations ; that they arranged the twelve constellations that 

 form our present zodiac to show the course of the sun's path in the 

 heavens ; divided time into weeks, months, and years ; that they di- 

 vided the week, as we now have it, into seven days, six being days of 

 labor and the seventh a day of rest, to which they gave a name from 

 which we have derived our word " sabbath," and which day, as a day 

 of rest from all labor of every kind, they observed as rigorously as the 

 Jew or the Puritan. The motion of the heavenly bodies and the phe- 

 nomena of the weather were noted down, and a connection, as I have 

 before stated, detected, as M. de Perville claims to have discovered, 

 between the weather and the changes of the moon. They invented 

 the sun-dial to mark the movements of the heavenly bodies, the water- 

 clock to measure time, and they speak in this work of the spots on the 

 sun, a fact they could only have known by the aid of telescopes, which 

 it is supposed they possessed, from observations that they have noted 

 down of the rising of Venus and the fact that Layard found a crystal 

 lens in the ruins of Nineveh. These " bricks " contain an account of 

 the deluge, substantially the same as the narrative in the Bible, except 

 that the names are different. They disclose that houses and land were 

 then sold, leased, and mortgaged, that money was loaned at interest, 

 and that the market-gardeners, to use an American phrase, " worked 

 on shares " ; that the farmer, when plowing with his oxen, beguiled 

 his labor with short and homely songs, two of which have been found ; 

 and, to connect this very remote civilization with the usages of to-day, 

 I may, in conclusion, refer to one of the bricks of this library, in the 

 form of a notice, which is to the effect that visitors are requested to 

 give to the librarian the number of the book they wish to consult, and 

 that it will be brought to them ; at the perusal of which one is disposed 

 to fall back upon the exclamation of Solomon, that there is nothing 

 new under the sun. 



A very curious fact has come to light, resulting from Dr. Schlie- 

 mann's discoveries in the Troad. In the lowest strata of his excava- 

 tions at Hissarlik he found a vase with an inscription in an unknown 

 language. Six years ago, the eminent Orientalist, E. Burnouf, declared 

 the inscription to be in Chinese characters, for which he was generally 

 laughed at at the time, from the improbability of Dr. Schliemann find- 

 ing, in the lowest strata of his excavations, a vase with an inscription 



