imary planet
at fifty-nine semi-diameters of the earth;--who had measured the
circumference of our globe with so much exactness that their
calculation only differed by a few feet from that made by our modern
geometricians;--who held that the moon and the other planets were worlds
like our own, and that the moon was diversified by mountains and valleys
and seas;--who asserted that there was yet a planet which revolved round
the sun, beyond the orbit of Saturn;--who reckoned the planets to be
sixteen in number;--and who reckoned the length of the tropical year
within three minutes of the true time; nor, indeed, were they wrong at
all, if a tradition mentioned by Plutarch be correct."(64)

64) Drummond, On the Zodiacs, p. 36.

Bailly, Sir W. Jones, Higgins, and Ledwich, as well as many modern
writers, agree in the conclusion that the Indians, the Egyptians,
the Assyrians, and the Chinese were simply the depositaries, not the
inventors, of science. The spirit of inquiry which in later times is
directing attention to the almost buried past is revealing the fact that
not merely the germs whence our present civilization has been developed
descended to us from the dim ages of antiquity, but that a great number
of the actual benefits which go to make up our present state of material
progress have come to us from prehistoric times. The art of writing, of
navigation (including the use of the compass), the working of metals,
astronomy, the telescope, gunpowder, mathematics, democracy, building,
weaving, dyeing, and many of the appliances of civilized life, have been
appropriated by later ages with no acknowledgment of the source
whence they were derived. When Pythagoras exhibited to the Greeks some
beautiful specimens of ancient architecture which he had brought from
Egypt and Babylon, they simply claimed them as their own, giving no
credit to the people who originated them; and subsequent ages, copying
their example, have refused to acknowledge that anything of value had
been achieved prior to the first Greek Olympiad.

When Philip of Macedon opened the gold mines of Thrace, a country in
which it will be remembered the worship of the Great Mother Cybele was
indigenous, he found that they had been previously worked "at great
expense and with great ingenuity by a people well versed in mechanics,
of whom no monuments whatever are extant."

The decorations on the breasts of some of the oldest mummies show that
the early E