532 COSMOS. 



The enlargement of the sphere of ideas, which arose from the 

 contemplation of numerous hitherto unobserved physical pheno- 

 mena, and from a contact with different races, and an acquaint- 

 ance with their contrasted forms of government, was not, unfor- 

 tunately, accompanied by the fruits of ethnological comparative 

 philology, as far as the latter is of a philosophical nature 

 depending on the fundamental relations of thought, or is 

 simply historical.* This species of inquiry was wholly un- 

 known to classical antiquity. But, on the other hand, Alex- 

 ander's expedition added to the science of the Greeks those 

 materials yielded by the long accumulated knowledge of more 

 anciently civilised nations. I would here especially refer to 

 the fact that, with an increased knowledge of the earth and 

 its productions, the Greeks likewise obtained from Babylon a 

 considerable accession to their knowledge of the heavens, as 

 we find from recent and carefully conducted investigations. 

 The conquest of Cyrus the Great had certainly greatly dimi- 

 nished the glory of the astronomical college of the priests in 

 the Oriental capital. The terraced pyramid of Belus (at once 

 a temple, a grave, and an observatory, from which the hours 

 of the night were proclaimed) had been given over to de- 

 struction by Xerxes, and was in ruins at the time of the 

 Macedonian campaign. But from the very fact of the disso- 

 lution of the close hierarchical caste, and owing to the forma- 

 tion of many schools of astronomy ,f Callisthenes was enabled 



* See Georg. Curtius, Die Sprachvergleichung in ihrem Verhdltniss 

 zur classichen Philologie, 1845, s. 5--7, and his Bildung der Tem- 

 pora und Modi, 1846, s. 3-9. (Compare also Pott's Article, Indo- 

 ffermanischer Sprachstamm, in the Allgem. Encyklopddie of Ersch 

 and Gruber, sect. ii. th. xviii. s. 1--112.) Investigations on lan- 

 guage in general, in as far as they touch upon the fundamental relations 

 of thought, are, however, to be found in Aristotle, where he develops 

 the connection of categories with grammatical relations. See the lumi- 

 nous statement of this comparison in Adolf Trendelenburg's Histor. 

 Beitrdge zur Philosophic, 1846, th. i. s. 23-32. 



f The schools of the Orchenes and Borsipenes (Strabo, lib. xvi. p. 

 739). In this passage four Chaldean mathematicians are indicated by 

 name, in conjunction with the Chaldean astronomers. This circum- 

 stance is so much the more important in a historical point of view, 

 because Ptolemy always mentions the observers of the heavenly bodies, 

 under the collective name of XaX^aToi, as if the observations at -Babylon 

 were only made collectively in collegiate bodies (Ideler, Handbuch der 

 Chronologic, bd. i. 1825, s. 198). 



