[Footnote 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.] The earliest historic name associated with astronomy in Greece was Thales, the founder of the Ionic school of philosophers. He is reported to have made a visit to Egypt, to have fixed the year at three hundred and sixty-five days, to have determined the course of the sun from solstice to solstice, and to have calculated eclipses. He attributed an eclipse of the moon to the interposition of the earth between the sun and moon, and an eclipse of the sun to the interposition of the moon between the sun and earth,--and thus taught the rotundity of the earth, sun, and moon. He also determined the ratio of the sun's diameter to its apparent orbit. As he first solved the problem of inscribing a right-angled triangle in a circle, he is the founder of geometrical science in Greece. He left, however, nothing to writing; hence all accounts of him are confused,--some doubting even if he made the discoveries attributed to him. His philosophical speculations, which science rejects,--such as that water is the principle of all things,--are irrelevant to a description of the progress of astronomy. That he was a great light no one questions, considering the ignorance with which he was surrounded. Anaximander, who followed Thales in philosophy, held to puerile doctrines concerning the motions and nature of the stars, which it is useless to repeat. His addition to science, if he made any, was in treating the magnitudes and distances of the planets. He constructed geographical charts, and attempted to delineate the celestial sphere, and to measure time with a gnomon, or time-pillar, by the motion of its shadow upon a dial.[2] [Footnote 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."]