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110 Y AL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



we know, in Assyria, towers being built for the purpose, and it does 

 not require telescopes to teach the true motions of the earth and planets; 

 Copernicus wrote on the heliocentric theory before Galileo. We may 

 very well believe that the Chaldees were acquainted with the facts, 

 as they were observant of eclipses and all stellar motions; also that 

 Pythagoras obtained reasonably .correct views from them. In ithe 

 teaching of them, unaided by established means of observation, he 

 would not be closely followed by his students; and in the hurly-burly 

 OT the violent attack upon the sect, their tenets would soon be obscured, 

 false interpretations given to his words, and the astronomical part of 

 his lore come down to what Stohœus gives us — " Philolaus said that 

 the governing power of the universe was in its central fire (fire, the 

 element, being not the literal fire we speak of now-a-days, but rather 

 the source and also the manifestation of energy) which Almighty God 

 cecupies and which is the turning point of the whole (sphere)." (Eel., 

 lib. 1, cap. xxii., 6: ed. Heer.).^ And again, "Others say the earth 

 ''• is stationary, but Philolaus, the Pythagorean, said it is carried around 

 '*' in a circle about the central fire, just like the sun and the moon." 

 It must be admitted that the phrases are not precisely Heliocentric, 

 but the view that the sun is central, if expressed and actually proved 

 bv the master, was likely to die out in a generation among the Italian 

 Greeks, who had no such observatories as there were in Eg}'pt and in 

 Asia. Pythagoras doubtless improved his mathematics in the East, 

 for we now know that even the famous theorem that the square on the 

 hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares 

 on the two other sides, which bears his illustrious name, was familiar 

 to the geometers of Hindostan centuries 1 efore his time.2 



It is instructive to compare the preceding hypotheses of the Genesis 

 with the theory of the present day. 



* See, for the fullest exposition of Pythagorean philosophy available, 



Fragmenta Philosophorum Grcccorum, CoUcgit Fr. Gull, Aug. Mullachus, Paris, 

 1881, Firmin Didot & Cie. 



-' Ed. Lucas, Recreations Mathématiques. The Indian method of proof, one 



of many, gives the figures merely, and underneath them is the one word 

 " Look " 



