LIGHT, LUMINARIES AND LIFE. 183 
geological thought in this country, that it was empirical. The 
astronomers of the earliest civilizations known to us, and pro- 
bably even Neolithic men,* had very ingenious ways of recording 
and classifying their observations of the apparent movements of 
the celestial bodies ; and, so far from being “ false ” were these, 
that they went a good way towards laying the basis of the 
Kalendar, by using the geocentric conception, upon which the 
Nautical Almanack in use to-day is constructed.f 
Professor Masperof tells us that “the Chaldeans had con- 
ducted astronomical observations from remote antiquity,” 
centuries anterior to the earliest date ever assigned to the Book 
of Genesis, and with such a degree of accuracy as to be able to 
foretell eclipses; and though their notions of the causes were 
affected by their “vain imaginations,” the observations were not 
falsified by that. One can follow Mr. E. Walter Maunder, 
F.R.A.S., of the Greenwich Observatory, much more readily than 
Professor Driver (even with Professor Bonney’s endorsement,)§ 
when, in his Address to the Victoria Institute,|| on “The Bible 
and Astronomy,” he tells us that “The Astronomy of [Genesis i] 
is indeed primitive and simple in character, but it is the 
astronomy of observation. It concerns the observed brightness 
of the sun, moon, and stars. But it is not myth; there is not 
the faintest deification of sun, or moon, or stars, or of spiritism. 
There is no confusion of ideas ; no anthropomorphic treatment 
of sun or moon. The astronomy of the chapter is sane and 
simple, and (we may truly say, to the very small extent to which 
it goes) scientific.” So the astronomer. Is it not possible for 
the mind of the geologist to be too geoconcentrated? It 
certainly seems that it was, for the quarter of a century or so 
which held the geological mind in the swaddling bands of 
uniformitarian empiricism, before it was forced to open its 
windows to the side-lights of astronomy, chemistry and 
physies.4 
One thing that impressed itself upon my mind in the 
* Hg., at Avebury and Stonehenge. 
t See letter by Mr. H. W. Morley in the Guardian, Nov. 27th, 1907. 
{ Dawn of Cwilization (trans. Maclure). 8.P.C.K., p. 775. 
§ C.F. Newspaper, Oct. 9th, 1908. 
|| Trans, vol. xl. 
“I Cf. Friday Lecture at the British Association, Bath Meeting (1888) 
by T. G. Bonney, F.R.S., on “the Foundation Stones of the Earth’s 
Crust,” and the Address to Section C on “ Evolutionary Geology,” by 
J. W. Sollas, F.R.S., in 1900; also Chemical and Physical Studies, etc., 
by myself (1889). 
N 
