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invisible monsters seize or swallow the sun and moon. this is very natural, so natural indeed that more correct astronomy has not yet rooted it out of Europe. Not many years ago a schoolmaster who ventured to lecture on astronomy in the west of England roused the displeasure of the country folk, that this young man should tell them the world was round and went about, when they had lived on it all their lives and knew it was flat and stood still. One part of the earliest astronomy, which was so sound as to have held its own ever since, was the measurement of time by the sun, moon, and stars. The day and the month fix themselves at once. In a less exact way the seasons of the year, such as the rainy season, or the icy season, or the growing season, furnish a means of reckoning, as where a savage tells of his father's death having been three rains or three winters ago. Rude tribes, who observe the stars to find their way by, notice also that the rising and setting of particular stars or constellations mark the seasons. Thus the natives of South Australia call the constellation Lyra the Loan-bird, for they notice that when it sets with the sun, the season for getting loan-birds' eggs has begun. It stands to reason that the great facts of the year's course, the change of the sun's height at noon, and the lengthening and shortening of the days, would be noticed, so that even among people who have not as yet measured them with any accuracy, there exists in a loose way the notion of the year. Within the year, too, the successive moons or months come to be arranged with some regularity, as where the Ojibwas reckoned in order the wild-rice moon, the leaves-falling moon, the ice-moon, the snow-shoes moon, and so forth. But such lunar months have to be got into the year as they best may. Indeed what distinguishes the uncivilized calendar, is that though days, months, and years are known,

the days are not yet fitted regularly into the months, nor is it settled how many months, much less how many days, the year is to consist of.

When we look from this to the astronomy of the ancient cultured nations, we find great progress made in observing and calculating. Yet the astronomer-priests who for ages watched and recorded the aspect of the heavens, had not yet cut themselves free from the ideas of their barbarian forefathers as to what the world as a whole was like. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the departed souls descend with the sun-god through the western gate, and travel with him among the fields and rivers of the under-world, and the Assyrian records also tell of the regions below, where Ishtar descends into the dark abode of fluttering ghosts, the house men enter but cannot depart from. Yet the Egyptians who held to this primitive astronomy had set the Great Pyramid by the cardinal points with remarkable exactness. In reckoning the year, they not only added to the 12 solar months of 30 days 5 intercalary days to make 365, but becoming aware that even this was not accurate, they recorded its variation till it should come round in a cycle of 1,461 years, as determined by the rising of Sirius. Even more advanced was the astronomy of the Chaldæans, with its records of eclipses extending over 2,000 years. In the astronomy of barbarians the five planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, are not thought much of in comparison with the Sun and Moon. But among the Chaldæans all the seven planets were classed together as objects of worship and observation, starting the ideas of the sacred number seven, which thence pervaded the mystical philosophy of the ancients. It may have been among the Babylonian astronomers that the study of the motions of the planets led to the theory that they were carried round on seven

crystal spheres; to this day people talk of being "in the seventh heaven." The next and great step in astronomy was when the long-treasured knowledge of Babylon and Egypt was taken up by the Greeks, to be carried on by the exact methods of the geometer. The Greek astronomers were familiar with the idea of the earth being a sphere; they calculated its circumference, and usually taking it as the centre of the universe, they measured the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies. This system, in its most perfect form known as the Ptolemaic, held its place into the middle ages, when it came into rivalry with the Copernican system of a central sun round which revolve the earth and other planets. How this became in the hands of Kepler and Newton a mechanical theory of the universe, and how man was at last stripped of the fond conceit that his little planet was the centre of all things, need not be re-told here.

Geography is a practical kind of knowledge in which the rudest tribes are well skilled, so far as it consists in the lie of their own land, the course of the streams, the passes over the mountains, how many days' marches through forest and desert to reach some distant hunting-ground, or the hillside where hard stone for hatchets is to be found. However uncivilized a people may be, they name their mountains and rivers in such terms as "red hill" or "beaver brook." Indeed the atlas contains hundreds of names of places that once had meanings in tongues which no man any longer speaks. Scientific geography begins when men come to drawing maps, an art which perhaps no savage takes to untaught, but which was known to the early civilized nations; the oldest known map is an Egyptian plan of the gold-mines of Ethiopia. The earliest known mention of a geographer attempting a map of the world is by Herodotus, who tells of Aristagoras's bronze tablet inscribed with the

But to

circuit of the whole earth, the sea and all rivers. the ancients the known world was a very limited district round their own countries. It brings the growth of geography well before our minds to look at the map in Gladstone's Juventus Mundi, representing the world according to the Homeric poems, with its group of nations round the Mediterranean, and the great Ocean River encircling the whole. Later, in the world as known to geographers such as Strabo, the lands of men form a vast oval, reaching from the pillars of Herakles across to far India, and from tropical Africa up to polar Europe. How land and sea came to lie as they do, it is the business of geology to explain. This is among the most modern of sciences, yet its problems had long set rude men thinking. Even the Greenlanders and the South Sea Islanders have noticed the fossils inland and high on the mountains, and account for them by declaring that the earth was once tilted over, or that the sea rose in a great flood and covered the mountains, leaving at their very tops the remains of fishes. In the infancy of Greek science, Herodotus speculated more rightly as to how the valley of Egypt had been formed by deposits of mud from the Nile, while the shells on the mountains proved to him that the sea had once been where dry land now is. But two thousand years had to pass before these lines of thought were followed up by the modern geologists, to whom the earth is now revealing the long history of the deposit and removal, rising and sinking of its beds, and the succession of plants and animals which from remote ages have lived upon it.

From this survey of the various branches of science, it is clear that their progress has been made in age after age by facts being more fully observed and more carefully reasoned Reasoning or logic is itself a science, but like other

on.

sciences, it began as an art which man practised without stopping to ask himself why or how. He worked out his conclusions by thinking and talking, untold ages before it occurred to him to lay down rules how to argue. Indeed, speech and reason work together. A language which distinguishes substantive, adjective, and verb, is already a powerful reasoning-apparatus. Men had made no mean advance toward scientific method when their language enabled them to class wood as heavy or light, and to form such propositions as, light wood floats, heavy wood sinks. The rise of reasoning into the scientific stage was chiefly due to the Greek philosophers, and Aristotle brought argument into a regular system by the method of syllogisms. Of course the simpler forms of these had always belonged to practical reasoning, and a savage, aware that red-hot coals burn flesh, would not thank a logician for explaining to him that in consequence of this principle a particular redhot coal will burn his fingers. It must not be supposed that the introduction of logic as a science had the effect of at once stopping bad argument, and it was rather by setting practically to work on exact reasoning, especially in mathematics, that the Greeks brought on a general advance in - knowledge. The importance of science was recognised when the famous Museum of Alexandria flourished, the type of later universities, with its great libraries, its laboratories, its zoological and botanical gardens. Hither students came by thousands to follow mathematics, chemistry, anatomy, under professors who resorted there at once to teach others and to learn themselves. Looking at the history of science for eighteen hundred years after this flourishing time, though some progress was made, it was not what might have been expected, and on the whole things went

The so-called scholastic period which prevailed in