[Footnote 2:  Dr. E.H.  Knight, in his “American Mechanical Dictionary” (i. 692), cites the Scriptural account of the beautiful altar seen by King Ahaz of Jerusalem, in Damascus, when he went thither to greet Tiglath-Pileser, the Assyrian who had helped him against his Samarian enemy.  Ahaz erected a similar altar at Jerusalem, and also a sun-dial, the same one mentioned in the account of the miraculous cure of his son Hezekiah.  “This,” says Dr. Knight, “was probably the first dial on record, and is one hundred and forty years before Thales, and nearly four hundred before Plato and Aristotle, and just a little previous to the lunar eclipses observed at Babylon, as recorded by Ptolemy....  The Hebrew word [for this dial] is said by Colonel White of the Bengal army to signify a staircase, which much strengthens the inference that it was like the equinoctial dial of the Indian nations and of Mesopotamia, from whence its pattern is assumed to have been derived.”]

Anaximenes of Miletus taught, like his predecessors, crude notions of the sun and stars, and speculated on the nature of the moon, but did nothing to advance his science on true grounds, except by the construction of sun-dials.  The same may be said of Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras:  they were great men, but they gave to the world mere speculations, some of which are very puerile.  They all held to the idea that the heavenly bodies revolved around the earth, and that the earth was a plain; but they explained eclipses, and supposed that the moon derived its light from the sun.  Some of them knew the difference between the planets and the fixed stars.  Anaxagoras scouted the notion that the sun was a god, and supposed it to be a mass of ignited stone,—­for which he was called an atheist.

Socrates, who belonged to another school, avoided all barren speculations concerning the universe, and confined himself to human actions and interests.  He looked even upon geometry in a very practical way, valuing it only so far as it could be made serviceable to land-measuring.  As for the stars and planets, he supposed it was impossible to arrive at a true knowledge of them, and regarded speculations upon them as useless.

It must be admitted that the Greek astronomers, however barren were their general theories, laid the foundation of science.  Pythagoras taught the obliquity of the ecliptic, probably learned in Egypt, and the identity of the morning and evening stars.  It is supposed that he maintained that the sun was the centre of the universe, and that the earth revolved around it; but this he did not demonstrate, and his whole system was unscientific, assuming certain arbitrary principles, from which he reasoned deductively.  “He assumed that fire is more worthy than earth; that the more worthy place must be given to the more worthy; that the extremity is more worthy than the intermediate parts,—­and hence, as the centre is an extremity,