in
figures, with tolerable accuracy, the superficial area of irregularly
shaped plots of land. The Chaldaeans could draw out, with a fair amount
of exactness, plans of properties or of towns, and their ambition
impelled them even to attempt to make maps of the world. The latter
were, it is true, but rough sketches, in which mythological beliefs
vitiated the information which merchants and soldiers had collected in
their journeys. The earth was represented as a disk surrounded by the
ocean stream: Chaldaea took up the greater part of it, and foreign
countries did not appear in it at all, or held a position out in the
cold at its extremities. Actual knowledge was woven in an extraordinary
manner with mystic considerations, in which the virtues of numbers,
their connections with the gods, and the application of geometrical
diagrams to the prediction of the future, played an important part.
We know what a brilliant fortune these speculations attained in
after-years, and the firm hold they obtained for centuries over Western
nations, as formerly over the Bast. It was not in arithmetic and
geometry alone, moreover, that the Chaldaeans were led away by such
deceits: each branch of science in its turn was vitiated by them,
and, indeed, it could hardly be otherwise when we come to consider the
Chaldaean outlook upon the universe. Its operations, in their eyes, were
not carried on under impersonal and unswerving laws, but by voluntary
and rational agents, swayed by an inexorable fate against which they
dared not rebel, but still free enough and powerful enough to avert by
magic the decrees of destiny, or at least to retard their execution.
From this conception of things each subordinate science was obliged to
make its investigations in two perfectly distinct regions: it had at
first to determine the material facts within its competence--such as the
position of the stars, for instance, or the symptoms of a malady; it
had then to discover the beings which revealed themselves through these
material manifestations, their names and their characteristics. When
once it had obtained this information, and could lay its hands upon
them, it could compel them to work on its behalf: science was thus
nothing else than the application of magic to a particular class of
phenomena.

The number of astronomical facts with which the Chaldaeans had made
themselves acquainted was considerable.

[Illustration: 340.jpg CHALDAEAN MAP OF THE WORLD.]