;' 24 INTRODUCTION. 



. 1 



had a common origin. If this were so, China, from its contiguity to 

 India and Chaldea, and from the delicious nature of its climate, must 

 have been first furnished with inhabitants. And the Egyptians, if ever j 

 they were a colony of Chinese, must have been transplanted into Egypt j 

 long before the commencement of history. It was from Egypt that the j 

 Greeks drew the first rudiments of their mathematical and physical sci- ( 

 ence ; and the scientific acquisitions of that singular people constitute 

 everything that we know respecting the progress which the ancients had 

 made in the investigation of nature. 



From the genial climate of the early inhabitants of the east, and the 

 nature of the life which they led, it was natural to expect that the mag- 

 nificent spectacle of the heavens would speedily attract their attention. 

 We are certain that the Chaldeans made astronomical observations at 

 least as early as the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth years of the era of 

 Nabonasser ; that is to say, seven hundred and nineteen and seven hun- 

 dred and twenty years before the commencement of the Christian era : 

 for Ptolemy makes use of three observations of the eclipses of the moon, 

 which took place during these years, and which he found in their rec- 

 ords. Diogenes Laertius informs us that the Egyptians had preserved 

 in their annals an account of three hundred and seventy-three eclipses of 

 the sun, and eight hundred and thirty-two of the moon, which had hap- 

 pened before the arrival of Alexander the Great in their country. Now 

 these eclipses required between twelve hundred and thirteen hundred 

 years to happen. Alexander's visit to Egypt took place in the year 331 

 before the Christian era. If we add this number to the length of time 

 during which the Egyptians continued to observe the eclipses of the sun 

 and moon, we obtain sixteen hundred and thirty-one years before the 

 commencement of the Christian era for the period at which the Egyp- 

 tians began to record their observations. This period is rather more 

 than a century after the death of Moses, and is about twenty-four years 

 before the institution of the Olympic games ; constituting but a small 

 part of the forty-eight thousand, eight hundred and sixty-three years du- 

 ring which they boasted that they had been engaged in making astro- 

 ( nomical observations ; but this was obviously a fable, invented for the pur- 

 t pose of raising themselves in the opinion of the Macedonian conqueror, j 



