1. In relating the legend of the Divine Man-Fish, who came out of the Gulf, and was followed, at intervals, by several more similar beings, Berosus assures us, that he "taught the people all the things that make up civilization," so that "nothing new was invented after that any more." But if, as is suggested, "this monstrous Oannes" is really a personification of the strangers who came into the land, and, being possessed of a higher culture, began to teach the Turanian population, the first part of this statement is as manifestly an exaggeration as the second. A people who had invented writing, who knew how to build, to make canals, to work metals, and who had passed out of the first and grossest stage of religious conceptions, might have much to learn, but certainly not _everything_. What the newcomers--whether Cushites or Semites--did teach them, was a more orderly way of organizing society and ruling it by means of laws and an established government, and, above all, astronomy and mathematics--sciences in which the Shumiro-Accads were little proficient, while the later and mixed nation, the Chaldeans, attained in them a very high perfection, so that many of their discoveries and the first principles laid down by them have come down to us as finally adopted facts, confirmed by later science. Thus, the division of the year into twelve months corresponding to as many constellations, known as "the twelve signs of the Zodiac," was familiar to them. They had also found out the division of the year into twelve months, only all their months had thirty days. So they were obliged to add an extra month--an intercalary month, as the scientific term is--every six years, to start even with the sun again, for they knew where the error in their reckoning lay. These things the strangers probably taught the Shumiro-Accads, but at the same time borrowed from them their way of counting. The Turanian races to this day have this peculiarity, that they do not care for the decimal system in arithmetic, but count by dozens and sixties, preferring numbers that can be divided by twelve and sixty. The Chinese even now do not measure time by centuries or periods of a hundred years, but by a cycle or period of sixty years. This was probably the origin of the division, adopted in Babylonia, of the sun's course into 360 equal parts or degrees, and of the day into twelve "_kasbus_" or double hours, since the kasbu answered to two of our hours, and was divided into sixty parts, which we might thus call "double minutes," while these again were composed of sixty "double seconds." The natural division of the year into twelve months made this so-called "docenal" and "sexagesimal" system of calculation particularly convenient, and it was applied to everything--measures of weight, distance, capacity and size as well as time.