โ Scribed by Eric Doolittle
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
To the early Chaldean astrologers who sought to read from the stars the things which the future had in store for them the appearance of the heavens was almost precisely as we see it to-day. The observer who will go out into the dark country on any starlight evening and watch the " multitude of fires" rise in the east, climb slowly upward and finally disappear in the west, will behold the spectacle which, with awful regularity, has been presented night after night since life on our world began, t?ven the singular grouping of stars into constellations, in which a far earlier people than the Chaldeans traced out the forms of animals and rivers and such like, has changed but little ; the bands of Orion, the Pleiades, and doubtless also the Dragon, the two Bears, the River and the other constellations were as familiar to the observers of Job's day as to us.
It was inevitable that men must from the first have thought sometimes concerning this "glorious host of light," where it came from, where it went to with the rising of the sun, and why, year after year, it did not change.its appearance ; but it was slowly, indeed, that the true conception' of our universe emerged from the fanciful speculations of the ancients. For, in the first place, much of the labor of astronomers was given up to the vain effort to find some connection between the motions of the stars and the affairs of their every-day life, and, in the second place, because the idea of a round world almost infinitely distant from the stars, though so familiar to us, must have been to them an hypothesis almost unthinkable in its absurdity. Between the years 5oo B. C. and 4oo A. D., however, a great advancement began, particularly in Greece and Arabia. It was during this period that there arose the great Greek philoso
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