STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 15f) 



can do while wc do live here is to shout at the top of our voices for the 

 space of about three hours daily, " Great is the Diana of the schools and 

 the philosophies 1 " 



The records and tablets of the ancient Accadiiens dug up from beneath 

 old Babylon, where they were deposited four thousand years before Christ 

 was born, show that this people, who lived there before the race which 

 built the more modern Babylon of Abraham's day came out of the East, 

 from their long-continued study of astronomy had actually liit upon the 

 same periodic cycle of the weather, within a small fraction of a year, 

 which Prof. Tice now announces from St. Louis as entirely new to the 

 age in which we live, and also entirely synchronous with our periodic 

 spots on the sun. These records were carefully kept in a great work of 

 seventy books, entitled "The Observations of Bell." They tell us that 

 these Accaditens "named the signs of the zodiac, and the days of the week, 

 and the seasons of the year ; divided the year into lunar months, and into 

 three hundred and sixty days, with intercalary months whenever the stars 

 requiri^d them to make an equation of time. The day was divided into 

 twelve double hours, each hour into sixty minutes, and each minute into 

 sixty seconds. The days of the week were named from the sun, moon, 

 and five planets ; and the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first and twenty- 

 eighth davs, or every seventh day of each month, were termed days of 

 rest, on which certain kinds of work was forbidden. Eclipses of the 

 moon were regularly calculated ;" but more particularly " cycles of twelve 

 years were in use, in which the weather was expected to repeat the same 

 successive phases :" and all this, too, before, according to our chronology, 

 Adam himself was created. If this is true it would surely seem that the laws 

 of nature and of God are more persistent, and reliable, and uniform, 

 than the theories and surmises of men; and, taken with the other facts 

 cited and predicted by him, demand for Father Tice's theory a thorough 

 and patient examination and regard. 



But before we can successfully examine tliis theory, or any other, wc 

 need a continuous and simultaneous examination of. and re])ort from, all 

 parts of, or at least some one great circle of. the globe. Nothing is more 

 evident than that any astronomical cause might, and probabl}' would, 

 produce periods of change in the weather regular in two respects, and, 

 therefore, apparenth' regular in no respect in any particular locality; that 

 is, it might be regular l)oth as to time and place, or regular in the time it 

 impressed the earth's forces as a whole, and also regular as to its maximum 

 point of effect in its march around the globe in lines c^f latitude, or other 

 lines, but if these two regularities did not happen t<j coincide or comjjlete 

 their circles at one and the same time, the phenomena would beapjjarenth' 

 irregular in any one single place or time. For example, if a crisis of force 

 should incline to take place at one partic niar e(iuino\, at mid-day, at the 

 next similar equinox \\holl\ another part of the earth might be under the 

 mid-day line, and ilie same effect experienced, perhaps, on diiei tl\ ihe 

 opposite side of the globe. There is no more reason tosupI)o^e that these 

 forces would affect all parts of the earth e(jiiall\- than that our e(-lipses so 

 effect it. This holds true of all possible investigations of the weather; 



