46 The Week 



From Sir Wm. Drummond's* work on the Zodiacs I am 

 compelled to quote — though through an admittedly reliable 

 channel — at second hand (which I regret, as I thereby lose the 

 references to his authorities which he always gives).-)- He 

 says : " The fact however is certain, that at some remote 

 period there were mathematicians and astronomers who 

 knew that the sun is in the centre of the planetary system, 

 and that the earth — itself a planet — revolves round the 

 central fire ; who calculated, or like ourselves attempted to 

 calculate, the return of comets, and who knew that these 

 bodies move in elliptical orbits, immensely elongated, having 

 the sun in one of their foci ; who indicated the number of 

 the solar years contained in the great cycle, by multiplying 

 a period (variously called in the Zend, the Sanscrit, and the 

 Chinese ven, van, and phen) of 180 years by another period 

 of 144 years ; who reckoned the sun's distance from the 

 earth at 800,000,000 of Olympic stadia" (=91,931,818 miles 

 ■at 606f feet to the stadium), " and who must therefore have 

 taken the parallax of that luminary by a method, not only 

 much more perfect than that said to be invented by 

 Hipparchus, but little inferior in exactness to that now in use 

 among the moderns" (much more exact, as it now appears, 

 for Sir W. D. knew nothing of the late corrections of the 

 estimated distance in question, which he only knew as 95J 

 millions of miles) ; " who could scarcely have made a mere 

 guess when they fixed the moon's distance from its primary 

 planet at 59 semi-diameters of the earth ; who had measured 

 the circumference of our globe with so much exactness that 

 their calculation only differed by a few feet from that made 

 by our modern mathematicians ; who held that the moon and 

 other planets were worlds like our own, and that the moon 

 was diversified by mountains, and valleys, and seas ; who 

 asserted that there was yet a planet which revolved round 

 the sun beyond the orbit of Saturn, who reckoned the 

 planets to be 16 in number, and who reckoned the length of 

 the tropical year within three minutes of the true time ; nor 

 indeed were they wrong at all, if a tradition mentioned by 

 Plutarch be correct." — Drummond on the Zodiacs, p. 36. 



* Sir Wm. Drummond died in 1828. He was a Fellow of the Eoyal 

 Society, and British Ambassador at the Two Sicilies and at Constantinople. 

 He wrote a Review of the Government of Sparta and Athens, Herculanensia, 

 Odin, Origines, (Edipus Judaicus, and this work on the Zodiacs. 



t See Godfrey Higgins' Keltic Druids, p. 50, and De Morgan's Budget of 

 Paradoxes, p, 164. 



