90.]

CHAPTER VIII.

ECLIPSES OF THE SUN MENTIONED IN HISTORY--CHINESE.

This is the first of several chapters which will be devoted to
historical eclipses. Of course the total eclipse of the Sun of August 9,
1896, observed in Norway and elsewhere, is, in a certain sense, an
eclipse mentioned in history, but that is not what is intended by the
title prefixed to these chapters. By the term "historical eclipses," as
used here, I mean eclipses which have been recorded by ancient
historians and chroniclers who were not necessarily astronomers, and who
wrote before the invention of the telescope. The date of this may be
conveniently taken as a dividing line, so that I shall deal chiefly with
eclipses which occurred before, say, the year 1600. There is another
reason why some such date as this is a suitable one from which to take a
new departure. Without at all avowing that superstition ceased on the
Earth in the year 1600 (for there is far too large a residuum still
available now, 300 years later), it may yet be said that the Revival of
Letters did do a good deal to divest celestial phenomena of those
alarming and panic-causing attributes which undoubtedly attached to them
during the earlier ages of the world and during the "Dark Ages" in
Western Europe quite as much as during any other period of the world's
history. No one can examine the writings of the ancient Greek and Roman
historians, and the chronicles kept in the monasteries of Western Europe
by their monkish occupiers, without being struck by the influence of
terror which such events as eclipses of the Sun and Moon and such
celestial visitors as Comets and Shooting Stars exercised far and wide.
And this influence overspread, not only the unlettered lower orders, but
many of those in far higher stations of life who, one might have hoped,
would have been exempt from such feelings of mental distress as they
often exhibited. Illustrations of this fact will be adduced in due
course.

It has always been supposed that the earliest recorded eclipse of the
Sun is one thus mentioned in an ancient Chinese classic--the _Chou-King_
(sometimes spelt _Shou-Ching_). The actual words used may be
translated:--"On the first day of the last month of Autumn the Sun and
Moon did not meet harmoniously in Fang." To say the least of it, this is
a moderately ambiguous announcement, and Chinese scholars, both
astronomers and non-astronomers,