PRIMITIVE ASTRONOMY. 431 
in the heavens and emits his most powerful rays.* Their first 
impulse is naturally to regard him as a deity. 
And so it was in ancient times ; the Sun was worshipped as the 
giver of light and warmth, and of all the richest fruits of the 
earth ; and his movements in the heavens were closely watched 
in order to obtain some clue with regard to his true nature. 
But in addition to this power of observation which our race 
possesses, another attribute of reason is that which prompts 
us to record impressions made upon the mind with a view to 
guide our contemporaries and posterity. This is a characteristic 
in the mental nature of man which serves as a marked distinc- 
tion between him and the lower animals, and constitutes the 
difference between his education and theirs. 
The ant and the bee convey information to their congeners 
of the discovery of a store of provender ; the cat can teach its 
kitten, and has even been known to instruct a young dog in 
the art of begging f (the most striking example of educability 
in the lower animals that we have seen recorded) ; but in these 
and similar cases the capacity is limited to the individual and 
never extends to the race. Should all the parent bees or ants 
die, or be removed before the young ones are born, no record will 
have been left to them of the experience of their progenitors, and 
the store or booty must be rediscovered, by accident or instinct, 
before it can become available for their use. 
Not so with man. The traces of his active mind and restless 
enterprise are everywhere to be encountered : in history, the 
arts, ancient relics, and works of engineering industry; and 
the records of many of his earliest impressions still serve us as 
guides in every-day life. No illustration of this is more striking 
than the sun-dial, one of the earliest devices of man for regu- 
lating his physical and mental operations, and at the same time 
an index to some of the earliest manifestations of his mental 
development; and yet this primitive chronometer is still in 
use, on the walls of village churches, as well as on the lawns of the 
affluent. 
When our ancestors watched the daily progress of the Sun 
through the sky, they perceived that, as he rose towards the 
zenith, the shadows which he cast on the ground became shorter, 
whilst, as he descended towards the horizon, they increased in 
length ; and they also noticed that there were certain periods 
or seasons when his shortest, or what we term his noon-day 
* Some of the ancient nations had only three seasons instead of four as in 
our day. The most striking changes in nature took place in Spring, Summer, 
and Winter, and these were the subdivisions of the year. Autumn or Har- 
vest (“ Herbst” of the Germans), was a later introduction. 
t Jesse. “ Popular Science Keview,” No. I., p. 118 . 
