It must be confessed, that to sift this grain of corn from the bushel of chaff with which it is surrounded, where every effort which the ingenuity of Greece could devise to render fable as current as truth, was resorted to, is no small task; that it requires the operation of the best exercised reason, and the assistance of extraordinary judgment, which is only to be attained through the medium of extensive experience and the exercise of clear and discriminative powers: then we pretend not to possess the best of possible acquisitions of this kind, but the best in our power, we have endeavoured to collect, and summoned to our assistance; and the value of our labours we will leave the public to judge. If the application of observations like the preceding ever come _apropos_, surely they apply to the present article; since from the _sideral_ science, all the errors of an idolatrous race proceeded in the major part of the population of the ancient world: from thence also proceeded the most sublime imagery which embellishes the syren voice of poetic song, the grandest metaphors, and the sweetest allegories, which ornament the transendent eloquence of the most able rhetoricians of Greece and Rome; the fire of exquisitely natural and most noble allusions which enliven and embellish their historic pages. The sweetest philosophical explications also flowed from thence, which ornament the various immortal works of their most excellent poets, orators, historians, natural and moral philosophers; and, in brief, of every description of the sublimest genius of ancient Greece and Rome, in their most divine effusions.