Note 132 — Chapter XII · THE STONE OF HERCULES.
Reading edition
In the twelfth century, B.C., Thschen-li records a measurement of the solstitial shadow, which La Place found accordant with the theory of the alteration of the obliquity of the Ecliptic. Cosmos.
The Babylonian astronomical observations sent by Callisthenes to Greece, have been calculated by Simplicius to extend back 1903 years before Alexander the Great.
Mr. Colebrooke has settled the date of one of the Vedas to be the fourteenth century B.C., by the place given to the solstitial points in a calendar appended to it.
“That the planets and their courses, the comets and theirs, that gravitation and repulsion were perfectly familiar to the priests of Memphis, though unknown to, or rather repudiated by, the most learned and philosophical of the Greeks, cannot to-day be questioned. They know the milky way to be composed of fixed stars, and the sun to be a fixed star.”—Drummond’s Origines, b. iv. c. 6; b. vii. c. 8.
“Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the French astronomers found with surprise that there existed in Siam a mode of calculating eclipses by successive operations worked with numbers apparently arbitrary. The key of this method has been long lost.”—Occult Sciences, vol. i. p. 191.