Читать книгу Beacon Lights of History (Vol.1-14) - John Lord - Страница 42

An exceedingly learned work (London, 1862) on the Astronomy of the Ancients, by Sir George Cornewall Lewis, though rather ostentatious in the parade of authorities, and minute on points which are not of much consequence, is worth consulting. Delambre's History of Ancient Astronomy has long been a classic, but is richer in materials for a history than a history itself. There is a valuable essay in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which refers to a list of special authors. Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences may also be consulted with profit. Dunglison's History of Medicine is a standard, giving much detailed information, and Leclerc among the French and Speugel among the Germans are esteemed authorities. Strabo's Geography is the most valuable of antiquity; see also Polybius: both of these have been translated and edited for English readers.

1. The style of modern historical criticism is well exemplified in the discussions of the Germans whether the Arx on the Capitoline Hill occupied the northeastern or southwestern corner, which take up nearly one half of the learned article on the Capitoline in Smith's Dictionary.

2. Dr. E.H. Knight, in his "American Mechanical Dictionary" (i. 692), cites the Scriptural account of the beautiful altar seen by King Ahaz of Jerusalem, in Damascus, when he went thither to greet Tiglath-Pileser, the Assyrian who had helped him against his Samarian enemy. Ahaz erected a similar altar at Jerusalem, and also a sun-dial, the same one mentioned in the account of the miraculous cure of his son Hezekiah. "This," says Dr. Knight, "was probably the first dial on record, and is one hundred and forty years before Thales, and nearly four hundred before Plato and Aristotle, and just a little previous to the lunar eclipses observed at Babylon, as recorded by Ptolemy. … The Hebrew word [for this dial] is said by Colonel White of the Bengal army to signify a staircase, which much strengthens the inference that it was like the equinoctial dial of the Indian nations and of Mesopotamia, from whence its pattern is assumed to have been derived."