PERIODICITY OF GOOD AND BAD SEASONS. 79 
been predicted, was 19 x 36 after Pharaoh’s. This seems to me 
to be very strong evidence in favour of the view that the Egyptians 
knew of the nineteen years’ cycle, and that the Jews brought the 
knowledge away with them. 
Those learned in Assyrian antiquities tell us that the book con- 
taining “the Observations of Bel,” the oldest astronomical book of 
that part of the world, was ordered to be kept by the king of Saros 
3,800 years B.C.; that book shows that they kept a record of 
‘astronomical and all other events, that they had discovered the 
nineteen years’ cycle of eclipses, and we are told that they 
believed that one event caused another, and all astronomical 
and meteorological observations were thus bound up together. 
Under such conditions I do not think it would be possible for 
them to avoid finding in the droughts a similar period to that 
in the eclipses, 7.¢., nineteen years, but even if they did it would 
have been impossible for those who kept the Nilometer in Egypt 
to avoid finding it in the variations of the heights of the Nile floods 
which were of such vital importance and so carefully recorded. 
Having got so far, I looked for any droughts mentioned in 
Roman history, to see if they would coincide like the others with 
the nineteen years’ cycle, and found two, one in 493 and the 
other in 436 B.C., in both cases these are repetitions of the A 
drought, but the historian has quoted the end of the drought for 
they are three years after my date, which is the second year of a 
drought that lasts from four toseven years. History tells us that 
in 138 B.C, there was a drought over the whole world, and the 
heat is said to have been excessively great: this intense heat, is one 
of the most marked feature of a D drought to-day; witness the 
excessive temperatures of January last, and the record temperature 
of Australia 127° at Bourke, was nineteen years before in 1877; 
while intense heat was a feature of January 1858, scorching heat 
of January 1839, and intense heat vee 1820 ; such is the 
D drought series in Australia. 
We thus see that five out of six Scripture poner fit into the 
nineteen years cycle, two from Roman history, and one from 
