ul 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 i