XXX11 NOTES, 



stars having been seen in the sky without interruption for the space of seventy 

 days, at the end of which it descended nearer to the earth, and let fall the 

 stone of JEgos Potamos, " which was only an inconsiderable portion of the 

 cloud," is very improbable, because it would require the direction and velocity 

 of the ball of fire to be for so many days the same as the Earth's ; in the case 

 of the fire-ball of July 19, 1686, described by Halley (Phil. Trans. Vol. xxix. 

 p. 163), this only lasted for a few minutes. It is somewhat uncertain whether 

 the Daiinachos, the writer irtgi eu<rej3e ins, was or was not the Daimachos of 

 Plateea, who was sent by Seleucus to India to the sou of Andracottos, and who 

 Strabo calls a "fabler" (p. 70, Cassaub.), but it seems not unlikely from 

 another passage of Plut. Compar. Solonis, c. Pop. cap. 4 : at any rate it is 

 only the account of a very late author, who wrote a century and a half after 

 the event, and whose authenticity is doubted by Plutarch. Compt., Note 62. 



H p. 124. Stob. ed. Heeren, i. 25, p. 508 ; Plut. de plac. Philos. ii. 13. 



( 89 ) p. 124. The remarkable passage in Plut. de plac. Philos. ii. 13, is to 

 the following effect: "Anaxagoras teaches that the ambient ether is a 

 fiery substance, which, by the force of its rotatory motion, has torn rocks 

 from the earth, inflamed them, and transformed them into stars." Availing 

 himself of an ancient fable to establish a physical dogma, the Clazomenian 

 appears to have attributed the fall of the Nemean lion from the Moon to the 

 Earth in the Peloponnesus to an analogous eftect of the general movement of 

 rotation, or to the centrifugal force. (JSlian, xii. 7 ; Plut. de Facie in Orbe 

 Lunse, c. 24 ; Schol. ex Cod. Paris, in Apoll. Argon. Lib. i. p. 498, ed. Scheef. 

 T. ii. p. 40 ; Meineke, Annal. Alex. 1843, p. 85). We have had stones from 

 the moon ; we have here an animal fallen from the moon ! According to an 

 ingenious remark of Bockh, the mythus of the lunar lion of Nemea may have 

 an astronomical origin, and a symbolical connection in chronology, with the 

 cycle of intercalation of the lunar year, the worship of the Moon at Nemea, 

 and the games by which it was accompanied. 



(^ p. 126. The following remarkable passage on the radiation of heat 

 from the fixed stars one of Kepler's many inspirations is found in the 

 Paralipom. in Vitell. Astron. pars Optica, 1604, Propos. xxxii. p. 25 : Lucis 

 proprium eet calor, sydera omnia calefaciunt. De syderum luce claritatis ratio 

 testatur, calorem universorum in minori esse proportione ad calorem unius solis, 

 quam ut ab homine, cujus est certa caloris mensura, uterque simul percipi et 

 judicari possit. De cincindularum lucula tenuissima ncgare non potes, quin 

 cum calore sit. Vivunt enim et moventur, hoc autcm non sine calefactione 

 perficitur. Sed neque putresceutium lignorum lux suo calore destituitur j nam 



