to the West; it gave the tendency to religious mysticism, which in its turn tended to superstition.  Instead of astronomy, it gave astrology; instead of science, it gave magic, incantations, and dreams.  The Eastern astronomers connected their astronomy with divination from the stars, and made their antiquity reach back to two hundred and seventy thousand years.  There were soothsayers in the time of Daniel, and magicians, exorcists, and interpreters of signs.  They were not men of scientific research, seeking truth; it was power they sought, by perverting the intellect of the people.  The astrology of the East was founded on the principle that a star or constellation presided over the birth of an individual, and that it either portended his fate, or shed a good or bad influence upon his future life.  The star which looked upon a child at the hour of his birth was called the “horoscopus,” and the peculiar influence of each planet was determined by the astrologers.  The superstitions of Egypt and Chaldaea unfortunately spread among both the Greeks and Romans, and these were about all that the Western nations learned from the boastful priests of occult Oriental science.  Whatever was known of real value among the ancients is due to the earnest inquiries of the Greeks.

And yet their researches were very unsatisfactory until the time of Hipparchus.  The primitive knowledge was almost nothing.  The Homeric poems regarded the earth as a circular plain bounded by the heaven, which was a solid vault or hemisphere, with its concavity turned downward.  This absurdity was believed until the time of Herodotus, five centuries after; nor was it exploded fully in the time of Aristotle.  The sun, moon, and stars were supposed to move upon or with the inner surface of the heavenly hemisphere, and the ocean was thought to gird the earth around as a great belt, into which the heavenly bodies sank at night.  Homer believed that the sun arose out of the ocean, ascended the heaven, and again plunged into the ocean, passing under the earth, and producing darkness.  The Greeks even personified the sun as a divine charioteer driving his fiery steeds over the steep of heaven, until he bathed them at evening in the western waves.  Apollo became the god of the sun, as Diana was the goddess of the moon.  But the early Greek inquirers did not attempt to explain how the sun found his way from the west back again to the east; they merely took note of the diurnal course, the alternation of day and night, the number of the seasons, and their regular successions.  They found the points of the compass by determining the recurrence of the equinoxes and solstices; but they had no conception of the ecliptic,—­of that great circle in the heaven formed by the sun’s annual course,—­and of its obliquity when compared with our equator.  Like the Egyptians and Babylonians, the Greeks ascertained the length of the year to be three hundred and sixty-five days; but perfect accuracy was lacking, for want of scientific