SKYFFARTH — ON THE THEORY OF THE MOON's MOTIONS. 513 



No. 9. Duration 2h. 5m. instead of 3h. 



No. 15. Beginning 8h. 41m. instead of gh. 56m. 



No. 17. Middle loh. 41m. instead of iih. 8m. 



No. 19. Middle I5h. 29m. instead of i6h. i3fn., and so forth. 



What astronomer would have committed so many and such gross 

 mistakes ! 



The worst of all, however, is that the eclipse No. 2, so well 

 described in the Almagest, concerning its time and magnitude, 

 and which Ptolemy referred to the year — 719, Sept. ist, 6h. cm., 

 terminated, according to Hansen's Tables, prior to the rising of 

 the moon in Babylonia. " This difliculty," says Prof. Hartwich, 

 " we would overcome by lessening the longitude of the moon in 



— 719; but, alas! in this case the ecliptic full moon (No. 8) 



— 282, Dec. 22d, i8h. 53m., in the Almagest would drop out of 

 existence." What then? Besides, the ft lay 16° W. of the earth's 

 shadow on occasion of the aforesaid eclipse. 



These mathematical facts will, as it appears to me, suffice to 

 destroy the whole of the reliability of the Almagest thus far, as 

 well as the groundwork of the present theory of the moon. Oth- 

 erwise, 1 take the liberty to request the reader to answer the 

 following questions : With what instruments may the Babylonian 

 astronomers have seen an invisible eclipse, so minutely described 

 in the Almagest.^ How could they notice an obscuration of the 

 moon amounting to one-quarter of an inch only, i.e. to 37".'' 

 How could they take an eclipse of t of an inch for an eclipse of 

 3 inches.-* 



Moreover, the unfavorable statements of Hansen's Tables are 

 confirmed by other ones. Ideler (Abhandlungen der Berlin. Aca- 

 demie d. W. 1814-15, p. 221), having computed anew the seven 

 older Babylonian eclipses, discovered that the magnitude of one 

 of them was only i inch 30 minutes, and not 3 inches, as the Al- 

 magest narrates, and so on. The same Tables brought to light 

 errors of ih.4m., of 49m., of 35m., of 30m., of 15m., and so forth. 

 In short, Ptolemy's eclipses could never have been observed by 

 astronomers. 



Finally, it is well known that Buerg, disregarding the Alma- 

 gest, based his Lunar Tables upon 3200 Greenwich observations, 

 and by means of these Tables Ideler recalculated the same seven 

 eclipses. The result, however, was that 3 of the said 7 eclipses 

 "i— 33 



