tronomy was
cultivated by both Babylonians and Egyptians, and that they made but
very limited attainments. They approximated to the truth in reference
to the solar year, by observing the equinoxes and solstices and the
heliacal rising of particular stars.

The early Greek philosophers who visited Egypt and the East in search of
knowledge, found very little to reward their curiosity or industry,--not
much beyond preposterous claims to a high antiquity, and to an esoteric
wisdom which has not yet been revealed. Plato and Eudoxus spent thirteen
years in Heliopolis for the purpose of extracting the scientific
knowledge of the Egyptian priests, yet they learned but little beyond
the fact that the solar year was a trifle beyond three hundred and
sixty-five days. No great names have come down to us from the priests of
Babylon or Egypt; no one gained an individual reputation. The Chaldaean
and Egyptian priests may have furnished the raw material of observation
to the Greeks, but the latter alone possessed the scientific genius by
which undigested facts were converted into a symmetrical system. The
East never gave valuable knowledge 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 unsat