PRIMITIVE ASTRONOMY. 
427 
fashion, and the lord lectures to the labourer ! Here was a 
citizen of the most important seaport in the world ; one who in 
all probability had an indirect voice in the government of the 
country ; who may have attended divine worship regularly, and 
have formed some idea of the nature of the Godhead ; ay, for all 
we know, he may have been and may still be a zealous member 
of some “ Cabmen’s Missionary Society,” actively employed in 
the task of converting sinners ; and yet this man was almost as 
ignorant of the true character of the natural world by which he 
is surrounded as the poor dumb brute that he lashed with the 
whip or encouraged to proceed with a clack of his tongue. 
Why, if those Chaldean shepherds of old, who are said to 
have been the Fathers of astronomy, and whose occupations 
are to some degree analogous to those of our cab- driver; 
if these had possessed half his advantages, had been acquainted 
with the use of electric telegraphs and railways, and been able to 
learn all that was known in their day through the medium of the 
printing press, for the cost of a draught of their wine, they would 
have far exceeded this man in intelligence ! And yet it is thou- 
sands of years since these poor shepherds Avatched the sun in 
his annual and diurnal course, marked his progress in the 
heavens, and, with him for a teacher, learnt Iioav to divide the 
year into its due times and seasons. And the ignorance of the 
old astronomers, even those of Heathendom, was edifying be- 
side that of the uncultivated minds which cast such a shade 
over the brightening intelligence of our Christian era. Their 
erroneous notions were at least poetical, and bore the mark of 
some kind of religion, whilst in our day this absence, in an 
adult, of the veriest rudiments of education is only suggestive 
of debased habits, and physical as well as moral depravity and 
destitution. 
Take, for example, the primitive theories concerning the 
Sun’s nature. 
The ancients were not content to receive his warmth and 
light; caring nothing as to whence he came, or whither he 
went, as do the ignorant of to-day, to whom life is but a season 
of sensual enjoyment. 
No, they strewed his path in the heavens \rith the flowers of 
poesy and sentiment. 
Even whilst the earth was still regarded as a flattened plain, 
bounded on all sides by the ocean, the heavenly bodies Avere 
believed to emerge from the latter at their rising, and again to 
sink into its depths at their setting.* The Iberians believed 
that they heard the hissing of the water when the burning Sun 
plunged into the Western Ocean. 
* LeAvis. “ Astronomy of the Ancients.” 6, et seq. 
