instruments and of recorded observations of the heavenly bodies.  The Greeks had not even a common chronological era for the designation of years.  Herodotus informs us that the Trojan War preceded his time by eight hundred years:  he merely states the interval between the event in question and his own time; he had certain data for distant periods.  The Greeks reckoned dates from the Trojan War, and the Romans from the building of their city.  The Greeks also divided the year into twelve months, and introduced the intercalary circle of eight years, although the Romans disused it afterward, until the calendar was reformed by Julius Caesar.  Thus there was no scientific astronomical knowledge worth mentioning among the primitive Greeks.

Immense research and learning have been expended by modern critics to show the state of scientific astronomy among the Greeks.  I am amazed equally at the amount of research and its comparative worthlessness; for what addition to science can be made by an enumeration of the puerilities and errors of the Greeks, and how wasted and pedantic the learning which ransacks all antiquity to prove that the Greeks adopted this or that absurdity![1]

[Footnote 1:  The style of modern historical criticism is well exemplified in the discussions of the Germans whether the Arx on the Capitoline Hill occupied the northeastern or southwestern corner, which take up nearly one half of the learned article on the Capitoline in Smith’s Dictionary.]

The earliest historic name associated with astronomy in Greece was Thales, the founder of the Ionic school of philosophers.  He is reported to have made a visit to Egypt, to have fixed the year at three hundred and sixty-five days, to have determined the course of the sun from solstice to solstice, and to have calculated eclipses.  He attributed an eclipse of the moon to the interposition of the earth between the sun and moon, and an eclipse of the sun to the interposition of the moon between the sun and earth,—­and thus taught the rotundity of the earth, sun, and moon.  He also determined the ratio of the sun’s diameter to its apparent orbit.  As he first solved the problem of inscribing a right-angled triangle in a circle, he is the founder of geometrical science in Greece.  He left, however, nothing to writing; hence all accounts of him are confused,—­some doubting even if he made the discoveries attributed to him.  His philosophical speculations, which science rejects,—­such as that water is the principle of all things,—­are irrelevant to a description of the progress of astronomy.  That he was a great light no one questions, considering the ignorance with which he was surrounded.

Anaximander, who followed Thales in philosophy, held to puerile doctrines concerning the motions and nature of the stars, which it is useless to repeat.  His addition to science, if he made any, was in treating the magnitudes and distances of the planets.  He constructed geographical charts, and attempted to delineate the celestial sphere, and to measure time with a gnomon, or time-pillar, by the motion of its shadow upon a dial.[2]