BACKWARDNESS OF THE ANCIENTS. 439 







and the causes of our inferiority are well enough understood. On the 

 contrary, the reasons of our own preeminence in the exact sciences are 

 by no means so generally known. Schiller, who, had he not been a 

 profound philosopher, would never have been the prince of poets that 

 he was, describes the realist as being characterized by a spirit of 

 " sober observation," and the idealist by a spirit of " restless specu- 

 lation." " When we presume," says he, " by the mere force of reason 

 to determine anything about the outer world, we do but trifle." How- 

 ever obvious the meaning of this remark may at first appear, we shall 

 find, on closer consideration, that in fact the author not only ascribes 

 to the idealistic mind of antiquity an undue bent toward speculation, 

 but that furthermore he plainly denies to it the faculty of correct ob- 

 servation. The entire justice of Schiller's remark, whether as taken 

 in its literal or in its implicative sense, is perhaps nowhere so patent 

 as in the province of astronomy. 



Every one knows of the clear skies which canopy the homes of the 

 early civilizations Italy, Greece, Spain, Egypt, Arabia. The purity 

 of the atmosphere enjoyed by these regions is shown by the im- 

 portance attached by the ancients to the knowledge of the rising and 

 setting of certain stars. In our countries astronomy must have been 

 precluded from taking the same direction by the fact that but rarely 

 do we see the stars near the horizon, to say nothing of seeing them on 

 the horizon, owing to the presence of haze, which in these regions 

 nearly always narrows the field of view. For this reason, had we 

 not the telescope, we should have been unable to attain to the com- 

 paratively accurate knowledge possessed by the ancients with regard 

 to the movements of Mercury, a planet which is hardly visible from 

 our latitudes We inhabitants of Central Europe might easily, in 

 point of cloudy skies, be the rivals of the dwellers on the shores of the 

 Sea of Azof the Cimmerians of the ancients. It might therefore be 

 supposed that the starry heavens, as these ancestors would describe 

 them to us, must be in great part invisible to us, and far richer than 

 we have been able to see them in later times. We must the more 

 expect them to describe things hardly visible to us as our present 

 division of the northern heavens into constellations dates, as far 

 as its main features are concerned, from at least 2,000 years ago, 

 and the firmament formed an object of studious contemplation even 

 then. Add to this the fact that, as early as the year 130 b. c, Hip- 

 parchus began to draw up a complete catalogue of all the fixed stars; 

 and Claudius Ptolemaeus, 150 years later, took up this task anew. 

 Now the "Almagest," as Ptolemy's work is called by the Arabs, who 

 handed it down to us, includes 1,028 stars ; and even if, on the strength 

 of a remark made by the elder Pliny, who speaks of 1,600 observed 

 stars, we with faint probability grant that the " Almagest " does not 

 represent the complete labors of Hipparchus and Ptolemy, still even 

 the second figure is far less than we should have expected. Argelan- 



