Astronomical and Nautical Collections, 443 



Year 



they are far too remote for the clouds to come within their 

 reach. The weather has been observed at certain times of 

 the year, and the places of the sun at these times having been 

 noted, the rising and setting of the stars have been employed 

 as marking those places and those seasons only: and a lighted 

 beacon might us well be called the cause of a war, as the appear- 

 ance of the stars the cause of a change of weather. And since 

 the sun has been about 40 days in the neighbourhood of the 

 tropic, about the time of the rising of the dog-star, the coinci- 

 dence serves to mark the hottest time of the year, without 

 giving the dog-star any claim to be the cause of heat: and in 

 fact it is the time of the apparent heliacal rising that we 

 remark : not that of the true rising, as it ought to be, if any 

 immediate operation of the stars were concerned." 



Mr. Champollion Figeac has attempted to go back to the 

 era of Menophres, in order to bring down from it, by the tes- 

 timony of miscellaneous authors respecting some facts of very 

 high antiquity, the dates of the series of reigns enumerated by 

 Manetho. But unless we prefer these authorities to that of 

 Munetho himself, we gain nothing by this substitution. The 

 name of " Menophrefj'*, cannot be identified with any kind of 

 certainty among Manetho'^ kings : while the date of the reign 

 of Darius is as well ascertained as that of the accession of Lewis 

 the 14th : and this reign belongs as clearly to Manetho*s 27th 

 dynasty, as to Ptolemy's records of eclipses. 



Egyptian year 

 of fJabonassar 



1, Thoth (I.) 1 ; true noon at Alexandria. This is the general 

 epoch of Ptolemy's tables, except those of the stars, which 

 are reduced to the first year of Antonine. His mean solar 

 time is reckoned from the true time of this epoch. 



In order to proceed with regularity in the computation 

 of the correct date of the epoch, it will be necessary to 

 anticipate some of the observations of Hipparchus : premi- 

 sing also a table of the length of the true tropical year, 

 beginning from the reign of Nabonassar, according to the 

 numbers lately employed by Mr. Poisson, which afford us, 

 for any number x of years beginning about this time, 

 365.2423854X - . 00000003327 5j:S for the days that they 

 contain. Hence, if we include in the variation of the time 

 of the true equinox, as shown in the Supplement to the Nau- 

 tical Almanac for 1828, we obtain the number of days wanting 

 in the Egyptian years. 



Egyptian 



iears. 

 00 

 200 

 300 

 400 



