Astronomy was probably born in Chaldaea as early as the time of Abraham.  The glories of the firmament were impressed upon the minds of the rude primitive races with an intensity which we do not feel, with all the triumphs of modern science.  The Chaldaean shepherds, as they watched their flocks by night, noted the movements of the planets, and gave names to the more brilliant constellations.  Before religious rituals were established, before great superstitions arose, before poetry was sung, before musical instruments were invented, before artists sculptured marble or melted bronze, before coins were stamped, before temples arose, before diseases were healed by the arts of medicine, before commerce was known, those Oriental shepherds counted the anxious hours by the position of certain constellations.  Astronomy is therefore the oldest of the ancient sciences, although it remained imperfect for more than four thousand years.  The old Assyrians, Egyptians, and Greeks made but few discoveries which are valued by modern astronomers, but they laid the foundation of the science, and ever regarded it as one of the noblest subjects that could stimulate the faculties of man.  It was invested with all that was religious and poetical.

The spacious level and unclouded horizon of Chaldaea afforded peculiar facilities of observation; and its pastoral and contemplative inhabitants, uncontaminated by the vices and superstitions of subsequent ages, active-minded and fresh, discovered after a long observation of eclipses—­some say extending over nineteen centuries—­the cycle of two hundred and twenty-three lunations, which brings back the eclipses in the same order.  Having once established their cycle, they laid the foundation for the most sublime of all the sciences.  Callisthenes transmitted from Babylon to Aristotle a collection of observations of all the eclipses that preceded the conquests of Alexander, together with the definite knowledge which the Chaldaeans had collected about the motions of the heavenly bodies.  Such knowledge was rude and simple, and amounted to little beyond the fact that there were spherical revolutions about an inclined axis, and that the poles pointed always to particular stars.  The Egyptians also recorded their observations, from which it would appear that they observed eclipses at least sixteen hundred years before the beginning of our era,—­which is not improbable, if the speculations of modern philosophers respecting the age of the world are entitled to credit.  The Egyptians discovered by the rising of Sirius that the year consists of three hundred and sixty-five and one-quarter days; and this was their sacred year, in distinction from the civil, which consisted of three hundred and sixty-five days.  They also had observed the courses of the planets, and could explain the phenomena of the stations and retrogradations; and it is asserted too that they regarded Mercury and Venus as satellites of the sun.  Some have maintained