OP THE UNIVERSE. EPOCH QV THE PTOLEMIES. 175 



Meridian, having its extremities at Alexandria and Syene, 

 and for its object the approximate determination of the earth's 

 circumference. It is not the result that he obtained, based 

 as it was upon imperfect data, furnished by pedestrians, 

 which awakens our interest; it is the endeavour of the 

 philosopher to rise from the narrow limits of a single country 

 to the knowledge of the magnitude of the entire globe. 



A similar tendency towards generalization of view is 

 manifested in the brilliant advances made in the epoch of 

 the Ptolemies towards a scientific knowledge of the heavens : 

 I allude here to the determination of the places of the fixed 

 stars by the earliest Alexandrian astronomers, Aristyllus 

 and Timocharis; to Aristarchus of Samos, the cotenipo- 

 rary of Cleanthes, who, familiar with the old Pythagorean 

 views, adventured an inquiry into the relations in space of 

 the whole fabric of the Universe, and who first recognised 

 the immeasurable distance of the heaven of the fixed stars 

 from our little planetary system, and even conjectured the 

 twofold movement of the earth, i. e. her rotation round her 

 axis, and her progressive movement around the sun ; to 

 Seleucus of Erythrea, or of Babylon, ( 271 ) who, a century 

 later, sought to support the views of the Samian philoso- 

 pher (views which we may term Copernican, and which at 

 that period found little acceptance) ; and to Hipparchus, 

 the creator of scientific astronomy, and the greatest of ob- 

 serving astronomers in all antiquity. Among the Greeks, 

 Hipparchus was the true and proper author of astronomical 

 tables, ( 2 72) and the discoverer of the precession of the equi- 

 noxes. His own observations of fixed stars (made at Rhodes, 

 not at Alexandria), when compared with those of Timo- 

 charis and Aristyllus, led him (probably without the sudden 



