476 COSMOS. 



Babylon, Nineveh, Kashmir, Iran, and also China, after the first 

 colony migrated from the north-eastern declivity of the Kouen- 

 Lun into the lower river valley of the Hoang-ho. These 

 central points involuntarily remind us of the largest amongst 

 the sparkling stars of the firmament, those eternal suns in the 

 regions of space, the intensity of whose brightness we certainly 

 know, although it is only in the case of a few that we have 

 been able to arrive at any certain knowledge regarding the 

 relative distances which separate them from our planet. 



The hypothesis regarding the physical knowledge supposed to 



the obliquity of the ecliptic, which was only established at the close of 

 the last century. All suspicion of a measurement of the earth's direction 

 derived by calculating back, falls therefore to the ground of itself. See 

 Edouard Biot sur la Constitution politique de la Chine au I2eme siecle 

 avant noire ere (1845), pp. 3 and 9. The building of Tyre and of the 

 original temple of Melkarth, (the Tyrian Hercules), would, according 

 to the account which Herodotus received from the priests (II. 44), reach 

 back 2760 years before our era. Compare also Heeren, Ideen uber 

 Politik und Verkehr der Volker, th. i. 2, 1824, s. 12. Simplicius cal- 

 culates, from a notice transmitted by Porphyry, that the date of the 

 earliest Babylonian astronomical observations which were known to 

 Aristotle, was 1903 years before Alexander the Great; and Ideler, who 

 is so profound and cautious as a chronologist, considers this estimate in 

 no way improbable. See his Handbuch der Chronologic, bd. i. s. 207; 

 the Abhandlungen der Berliner Akad. auf das J. 1814, s. 217; and 

 Bb'ckh, Metrol. Untersuchungen uber die Masse des Alterthums, 1838, 

 s. 36. Whether safe historic ground is to be found in India earlier than 

 1200 B.C., according to the chronicles of Kashineer (Radjatarangini, 

 trad, par Troyer,) is a question still involved in obscurity, while Mega- 

 sthenes (Indica, ed. Schwanbeck, 1846, p. 50), reckons for 153 kings of 

 the dynasty of Magadha from Manu to Kandragupta from sixty to 

 sixty-four centuries, and the astronomer Aryabhatta places the beginning 

 of his chronology 3102 B.C. (Lassen, Ind. Alterthumsk., bd. i. s. 473-505^ 

 507, and 510). In order to give the numbers contained in this note -a 

 higher significance in respect to the history of human civilisation, it will 

 not be superfluous to recal the fact that the destruction of- Troy is placed 

 by the Greeks, 1184, by Homer 1000 or 950, and by Cadmus the Mile- 

 sian, the first historical writeramong the Greeks, 524 years before our 

 era. This comparison of epochs proves at what different periods the 

 desire for an exact record of events and enterprises was awakened among 

 the nations most highly susceptible of culture, and we are involuntarily 

 reminded of the exclamation which Plato, in the Timceus, puts in the 

 mouth of the priests of Sais: " Solon, Solon ! ye Greeks still remain 

 ever children; nowhere in Hellas is there an aged man.. Your souls are 

 ever youthful, ye have in them no knowledge of antiauity, no ancient 

 belief, no wisdom grown venerable by age." 



