This fact, that in very early stages of social progress it is known that the moon goes through her changes in nearly thirty days, and that in rather more than twelve moons the seasons return—this fact that chronological astronomy assumes a certain scientific character even before geometry does; while it is partly due to the circumstance that the astronomical divisions, day, month, and year, are ready made for us, is partly due to the further circumstances that agricultural and other operations were at first regulated astronomically, and that from the supposed divine nature of the heavenly bodies their motions determined the periodical religious festivals. As instances of the one we have the observation of the Egyptians, that the rising of the Nile corresponded with the heliacal rising of Sirius; the directions given by Hesiod for reaping and ploughing, according to the positions of the Pleiades; and his maxim that “fifty days after the turning of the sun is a seasonable time for beginning a voyage.” As instances of the other, we have the naming of the days after the sun, moon, and planets; the early attempts among Eastern nations to regulate the calendar so that the gods might not be offended by the displacement of their sacrifices; and the fixing of the great annual festival of the Peruvians by the position of the sun. {48} In all which facts we see that, at first, science was simply an appliance of religion and industry. After the discoveries that a lunation occupies nearly thirty days, and that some twelve lunations occupy a year—discoveries which we may infer were the earliest, from the fact that existing uncivilized races have made them—we come to the first known astronomical records, which are those of eclipses. The Chaldeans were able to predict these. “This they did, probably,” says Dr. Whewell in his useful history, from which most of the materials we are about to use will be drawn, “by means of their cycle of 223 months, or about eighteen years; for, at the end of this time, the eclipses of the moon begin to return, at the same intervals and in the same order as at the beginning.” Now this method of calculating eclipses by means of a recurring cycle,—the _Saros_ as they called it—is a more complex case of prevision by means of coincidence of measures. For by what observations must the Chaldeans have discovered this cycle? Obviously, as Delambre infers, by inspecting their registers; by comparing the successive intervals; by finding that some of the intervals were alike; by seeing that these equal intervals were eighteen years apart; by discovering that _all_ the intervals that were eighteen years apart were equal; by ascertaining that the intervals formed a series which repeated itself, so that if one of the cycles of intervals were superposed on another the divisions would fit. And this being once perceived, it became possible to use the cycle as a scale of time by which to measure out future periods of recurrence.