00 Character of Early Egyptian Science. 



who were ordered by the King Psammetichus to be brought 

 up among the goats, without any one being permitted to speak 

 to them, that it might be ascertained, by the words they 

 should first utter, which nation was the most ancient. While 

 they were thus inquisitive on this point, and took this hopeful 

 method to settle it, they were utterly incurious regarding the 

 most wonderful natural phenomenon of their country, the over- 

 flowing of the Nile. Regarding the causes of this, Herodotus 

 tells us he could not get so much as a conjecture either from 

 the priests or any other Egyptian, although he expressed to 

 them a very earnest desire to learn something about them. He 

 puts us, in another place, in possession of the accuracy of their 

 conceptions regarding other natural phenomena, by telling us 

 that the priests informed him, during the reign of their mortal 

 kings, the sun had altered his course four times, had risen 

 twice in the east and twice in the west ; and, in full accordance 

 with this singular specimen of their science, he tells us their 

 astronomy was not their own, but that they had got it, and the 

 use of the gnomon, and the division of the day, from the Chal- 

 deans. It is unnecessary to go on to quote from the same 

 source their opinion that fire is a fierce animal, eating up every 

 thing, and then dying when it has no more to eat; or their 

 sage conjectures, like those of the inhabitants of Laputa re- 

 garding the health of the sun, that the other nations must some 

 time or other perish, as they depended on rain for rendering 

 their soil productive, while that of their own country was ren- 

 dered fertile by their river. In the face of this positive testi- 

 mony of the utter worthlessness and ineptitude of their science 

 and theories, furnished us by one so inquisitive, and who had 

 the amplest means of acquiring the proper information on the 

 spot, it would be quite unwarrantable to conjecture that they 

 had any thing among them at all equivalent to our modern 

 geology. 



But independently of the testimony of Herodotus, after the 

 time of Cambyses, we have some insight into the worthkssness 

 of the Egyptian science, through Thales and Pythagoras, who 

 both visited Egypt before the time of that invader. Before 

 making a few observations on what we learn through them, we 

 must enter a protest against what is stated in No. 17. of the 



