by the word Chas-dim, that is, the men of Chas, Scythians, or wanderers, who had entered into Assyria and Egypt long before the Prophet Jeremiah. Chaldæa was nothing more than a small territory, south of Babylon, appropriated to the Chaldæes. And there they instructed the Babylonish priests in the art of Chaldæa, or of predicting the revolution of the heavenly bodies. Chaldæi appears to be the general name for the calculators of time, for soothsayers, and for magi, as is to be proved from Laertius. The Persians called those magi, says Dion. Chrysost: who were employed in the service of their Gods; but the Greeks being ignorant of the meaning of the word, applied it to such as were skilled in magic, a science unknown to the Persians. From the Magogian Scythians the name descended with the Pelasgi among the Celto-Scythiac nations, and hence, the present Scottish name Culdea. But the Chaldæan philosophy was not taught after the Grecian manner, by public professors, to all sorts of auditors indifferently. It was restrained to certain famiies. These addicted themselves wholly to study, and lived exempt from all public concerns and duties. These were the Priests whom the Babylonians called Chaldæans. In Baby

*Collect. de Reb. Hib. + Diodorus Siculus.

lonia,

lonia, says Strabo, there were peculiar habitations allotted for the philosophers of that country, who were termed Chaldæans. They inhabited a certain portion of Babylonia, adjoining to the Arabians, and to the Persian gulph. These were the order, who went out with others to meet Alexander. Then went the magi, after "their manner; next went the Chaldæans, non "vates modo, sed artifices Babyloniorum," whom Curtius interprets, not those who made instruments for the practice of their art, but the Chaldæans of both sorts, the tradesmen and the learned. Moreover, as all the professors of learning among the Chaldæans, were distinguished from the rest of the people by their common denomination, so were they distinguished among themselves into sects, denominated from the several parts of the country wherein they were established, and according to the several sciences which they professed. *

Though astronomy was in high esteem among the Chaldæans, and they cultivated it with great diligence, it does not appear to the conviction of some modern writers, at least, that they made any very considerable progress

in it;

nor

nor, indeed, could they, say they, comparatively speaking, when we recollect they were destitute of the instruments invented and improved in later times, as well probably, as of the geometrical and arithmetical operations now familiar to every astronomer. In the time of Alexander the Great, these philosophers wished it to be believed, that astronomy had flourished in Babylonia four hundred and seventy thousand years. But this was the effect of preposterous vanity; and though Cicero mentions the observations of such a wonderful period, it yet might be somewhat nearer the truth, if we were to reverse the order of things, and to turn these years into days. Callisthenes, who accompanied Alexander, sent an account of the observations he had met with, to Aristotle: these observations went no further back than one thousand nine hundred and three years. They remounted twenty two hundred and thirty four years beyond the christian computation. Notwithstanding which, the Chaldæans had indisputably great astronomical merit; and whatever was the antiquity of their knowledge, they were at least the instructors of those who have hitherto been called, ancient astronomers. Pythagoras, who flourished near 600 years before Christ, and who established true philosophy, nearly at

the

the same moment that true liberty and the consulship became established by the elder Brutus, acquired his knowledge of astronomy in the east, and in other foreign countries. He spent 22 years in Egypt, and complied with all the customs peculiar to the priesthood, the better to obtain an unrestrained intercourse with those from whom he was to derive instruction.*

Modern astronomers claim the merit of having found out the principles of universal gravitation, and of the centripetal and centrifugal forces. But it is certain the ancients were not ignorant of those powers. Pythagoras, evidently alludes to the centrifugal, and to the contrary centripetal impulse, in that passage which he concludes by saying, that God is xxxww ἀπάνιου κίνησις, the motion or mover of all circles. The moderns, indeed, have explained them with more clearness and precision. Not that the ancients gave them expressly the names which they have at this day. They clearly, however, understood the laws of the motions of the planets, according to their distance from a common centre. Plutarch, who was acquainted E e 2

Jamblicus. + Baxter.

with

with almost all the brilliant truths of astronomy, and the attractive forces which make the planets gravitate towards each other, attempts to account for the principle of attraction, by saying, "there is a reciprocal attraction between all "bodies, which is the cause that the earth "makes all terrestrial bodies gravitate towards

her, in like manner as the sun and moon "make all solar and lunar bodies gravitate to"wards them; and these are retained in their re"spective spheres by the sole power of attrac"tion." But others, particularly Pythagoras, were unquestionably masters of this doctrine long before Plutarch.* The Pythagoreans, says Aristotle, held that the earth was moveable, not seated in the midst of the universe, but suspended as being one of the stars; that it was carried about the fire which is in the centre; and that it thereby made night and day. This was what their master taught. Numa, remarks Newton, would not have constructed a temple to Vesta at Rome, nor placed in it a perpetual fire, had it not been as a symbol of the immobility of the sun in the centre of the world.

But it would be endless to dive into all the numerous authorities which might be adduced,

* Duten.

of