12 
ANNUAL ADDRESS. 
were severally composed, and from that of the astronomy of the 
present day. 
The former enquiry need not involve us in any question of 
the higher criticism, for though the dating of the books of the 
Bible, once almost universally accepted, has been so greatly 
disturbed within the last sixty years or so, we find in dealing 
with astronomy that we are relieved from the necessity of 
fixing the true dates of the various sacred books since we know 
that the science underwent very little change between the 
earliest and latest dates that can, upon any hypothesis, be 
assigned to any of them. For, on the one hand, the constella- 
tions, substantially as they are preserved to us in the poem of 
Aratus, were certainly designed before the time of Abraham. On 
the other hand the Old Testament Scriptures had been completed 
before the great astronomical revolution was affected which we 
associate with the name of Hipparchus of Bithynia. In the 
period of more than 2,000 years which separated the two, there 
was, beyond doubt, some advance : the five planets were 
discovered, and their movements watched with some degree of 
particularity ; the calendar was set in order, different devices 
for this purpose being adopted in different countries ; but 
broadly speaking, we may say that astronomy underwent no 
revolutionary development during the whole of this period, just 
as later there was' no important change between the days of 
Hipparchus and those of Copernicus and Galileo. Broadly 
speaking we may say that the astronomy of the ages during 
which the Old Testament Scriptures were being written, was 
the astronomy of the constellations. 
The constellations of Aratus and of Ptolemy themselves 
reveal to us their date by a simple fact. They do not cover 
the whole sky, but leave untouched a large space in the south, 
which evidently represents the invisible part of the heavens at 
the time and place of the origin of the constellation figures. 
Somewhere between N. Lat. 40° and 35°, sometime in the third 
millennium before our era, the astronomers of the ancient world 
set their hands to this great task, the task of making a 
primitive catalogue of the stars. 
It is not only that the constellations were the chief asset of 
astronomy in general during the two thousand years between 
Abraham and the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into 
Greek ; they formed in all probability a principal part of the 
Hebrew astronomy. For we know from the constellations 
themselves, that they were designed before the time of Abraham. 
And we also know from Babylonian “ boundary stones ” and 
