Editorial note — APPENDIX.

A3. Lalande observes that Mr. Bailly has gone back, in his astronomical researches, to the first traditions of an antedeluvian people, among whom there remained scarcely any traces of such knowledge; and that he has presented us, in his work, with ingenious conjectures and probabilities; or, more properly, appearances of truth, (“vraisemblables,”) written with many charms of extensive information. But, according to Mr. Lalande himself, all the ancient astronomy down to the time of Chiron, which was about fourteen centuries before the Christian era, may with probability be reduced to the examining of the rising of some stars at different times of the year, and the phases of the moon; since, long after that period, as this great astronomer remarks, the Chaldeans and Egyptians yet knew nothing of either the duration or the inequalities of the planetary movements. W. B.

A4. See the preceding note.

A5. Some of the constellations appear to have been named, even before the time of Moses, who was born 1571 years before Christ: but, probably, most of them received their names about the time of the Argonautic expedition, which took place in the year 1263, B. C

Hesiod and Homer who were co-temporaries, or, at least, flourished nearly at the same time, that is to say, about nine centuries before the Christian era, mention several of the constellations; and, among the rest, the Bear and the Hyades: and it is noticed by Mr. Lalande, that La Condamine says the Indians on the river Amazons gave to the seven stars in the Hyades, the name of the Bull’s-head, as we do; and that Father Lasitau tells us, the Iroquois called that assemblage of stars to which we give the name of the Bear, by the same name; and named the polar star “the star that does not move.”

These are interesting facts. There is not the least resemblance, whatever, in the two constellations which have been mentioned, to the animals whose names they bear. Is it not, then, a matter of great curiosity, as well as one which may prove important in its result, to enquire, why two great tribes of uncivilized men, (supposed, by some, to be aborigines,) in the northern and southern sections of the western hemisphere, should apply the same denominations to two assemblages of stars, by which those constellations were known to Hesiod and Homer, if not earlier, and at least twenty-five hundred years before? W. B.

A6. Hipparchus (of Nicæa, in Bithynia,) was a very celebrated mathematician and astronomer of antiquity. Mr. Lalande styles him the most laborious and most intelligent astronomer of antiquity, of whom we have any record; and asserts, that the true astronomy which has come down to us, originated with him. He divided the heavens into forty-eight (some say forty-nine) constellations, and assigned names to the stars. He is also said to have determined latitude and longitude and to have computed the latter from the Canaries; and he is supposed to be the first who, after Thales, calculated eclipses with some degree of accuracy: but he makes no mention of comets. Hipparchus died one hundred and twenty five years before the Christian era. W. B.

A7. Friar Bacon is said to have been almost the only astronomer of his age; he informs us that there were then but four persons in Europe who had made any considerable proficiency in the mathematics.

A8. Regiomontanus was born in the year 1436, at Kœnigsberg, a town of Franconia, subject to the house of Saxe-Weimar. His real name was John Müller: but he assumed the name of Regiomontanus from that of the place of his nativity, which signifies Regius Mons.

This astronomer, who was greatly celebrated in his time, was the first, according to Lalande, who calculated good Almanacks; which he had composed for thirty successive years; viz. from 1476 to 1506. In these (which were all published at Nuremberg in 1474, two years before his death,) he announced the daily longitudes of the planets, their latitudes, their aspects, and foretold all the eclipses of the sun and moon; and these ephemerides were received with uncommon interest by all nations. After noticing these, Lalande mentions the ephemerides which are published annually at Bologna, Vienna, Berlin, and Milan; but he pronounces the Nautical Almanack, of London, to be the most perfect ephemeris that was ever published. Regiomontanus compiled several other works, which greatly promoted his reputation, He died in 1476, at the age of forty years. W. B.

A9. See some interesting particulars respecting this great man in Lord Buchan’s account of the Tomb of Copernicus, and in the note thereto, inserted in the Appendix. W. B.

A10. Tycho-Brahé, as Lalande remarks, was the first who, by the accuracy and the number of his observations, prepared the way for the renewal of astronomy. The theories, the tables, and the discoveries of Kepler, are founded on his observations; and Lalande thinks, that their names, after those of Hipparchus and Copernicus, ought to be transmitted with immortal honour to posterity.

Tycho was born in the year 1546, at Knudsturp in Scania in Denmark, of a noble family, which subsisted also in Sweden under the name of Brahé, and to which the marshal count Lœwendahl was allied. He died in 1601, at the age of fifty-five years.

Frederick II, king of Denmark, gave to Tycho the little island of Huen, called in Latin Venusin, towards the Sound, and about ten leagues, northward, from Copenhagen: where that prince erected for him a castle, named Uraniberg, and an observatory attached to it, completely furnished with the best instruments. Yet only fifty-one years after the death of Tycho, Mr. Huet, whose curiosity led him to visit a place so celebrated could find no vestige of the observatory. One solitary old man, who yet retained some recollection of it, told him that the tempestuous winds to which they were subject along the Sound, had demolished it. Even the name of Tycho was then unknown in that savage island, as Mr. Lalande indignantly styles it: and Mr. Picard, who was sent by the French academy, in 1671, to ascertain the exact situation of the observatory, was obliged to have the earth dug away, in order to discover its foundation. W. B.

A11. “Certain it is,” says the learned and pious Dr. Samuel Clarke (in his Discourse on the Evidences of Nat. and Rev. Religion,) “and this is a great deal to say, that the generality, even of the meanest and most vulgar and ignorant people,” (among Christians,) “have truer and worthier notions of God, more just and right apprehensions concerning his attributes and perfections, deeper sense of the difference of good and evil, a greater regard to moral obligations and to the plain and more necessary duties of life, and a more firm and universal expectation of a future state of rewards and punishments, than, in any heathen country, any considerable number of men were found to have had.”

In like manner, Archdeacon Paley (in his View of the Evidences of Christianity) observes:—“Christianity, in every country in which it is professed, has obtained a sensible, although not a complete influence, upon the public judgment of morals. And this is very important. For without the occasional correction which public opinion receives, by referring to some fixed standard of morality, no man can foretell into what extravagances it might wander.” “From the first general notification of Christianity to the present day,” says the same ingenious writer, “there have been in every age many millions, whose names were never heard of, made better by it, not only in their conduct, but in their dispositions; and happier, not so much in their external circumstances, as in that which is inter præcordia, in that which alone deserves the name of happiness, the tranquillity and consolation of their thoughts. It has been since its commencement, the author of happiness and virtue to millions and millions of the human race.” He then asks: “Who is there, that would not wish his son to be a Christian?” W. B.

A12. Some of the commentators inform us, that Mahomet taught that the earth is supported by the tip of the horn of a prodigious ox, who stands on a huge white stone; and that it is the little and almost unavoidable motions of this ox which produce earthquakes.

A13. Pythagoras, who was one of the most celebrated among the Greek philosophers, in the knowledge and study of the heavens, was born about 540 years before the Christian era. It is believed that he was the first who made mention of the obliquity of the ecliptic, and of the angle which this circle makes with the equator; although Pliny attributes this discovery to Anaximander, whose birth was seventy years earlier. Among the remarkable things which Pythagoras taught his disciples, was the doctrine that fire, or heat, occupied the centre of the world; it is supposed he meant to say, that the sun is placed in the centre of the planetery system, and that the earth revolves around him, like the other planets. He also maintained each star to be a world; and that these worlds were distributed in an ethereal space of infinite extent. W. B.

A14. Thales, who died about five centuries and an half before the Christian era, in the ninety-sixth year of his age,^[A14a] first taught the Greeks the cause of eclipses, He knew the spherical form of the earth; he distinguished the zones of the earth by the mean of the tropicks and the polar circles; and he treated of an oblique circle or zodiac, of a meridian which intersects all these circles in extending north and south, and of the magnitude of the apparent diameter of the sun.

Herodotus, Cicero, and Pliny, assert, as is noticed by Mr. Lalande, that Thales had predicted, to the Ionians a total eclipse of the sun, which took place during the war between the Lydians and the Medes, But the manner in which Herodotus (who lived about one century, only, after the time of Thales) speaks of this prediction, is so vague, that one finds some difficulty in believing that it was fact, If it were true, says Lalande, that Thales had actually foretold an eclipse of the sun, it could be no otherwise, than by means of the general period of eighteen years, of which he would have acquired a knowledge from the Egyptians or the Chaldeans: for the period had not yet arrived, when eclipses could be prognosticated by an exact calculation of the motion of the moon. W. B.