Few young women will, in the ordinary course, win a separate fame along the solitary path of pure art. Most of them, and most of those who come within the radius of the influence of their aspirations and their art work, will become wives, home-makers, mothers. Many more will become teachers, or are that now, wielding potent influence. It is these who will strike the keynote for the quality of atmosphere that is to shape, as it will surround, the generations yet unborn; and, because of that, the feeling and aspiration that many of the poems seen in our current journals disclose, is important and significant at this transitional time. ANCIENT ASTRONOMY: by Fred J. Dick, M. Inst. C. E. In perhaps no department of thought has appreciation of the achievements of antiquity been more inadequate than in that of astronomy. This is all the more remarkable when we remember that many facts have been published and are accessible, amply sufficient to convince any unbiased student as to the hoary antiquity of the science; and also as to the fact that in the remotest times it was a science whose exactitude surpassed that of modernity because based upon immense periods of observation and a profound knowledge of the harmonious laws underlying celestial motions; in comparison with which knowledge our generalizations and mathematical triumphs pale into insignificance. Such statements are hardly likely to meet ready acceptance from those who have not yet realized the immense antiquity of the human race, the cyclic rises and falls of nations and races coeval with vanished continents, and the fact that there were times when humanity had divine instructors in the arts and sciences. Yet without some recognition of these basic ideas it is hardly possible to comprehend even faintly the significance of some statements made in the _Sûrya-Siddhânta_--one of the oldest treatises on astronomy extant. There are many others--perhaps thousands--but they are not accessible at the present time, probably because they would be still less understood. Another thing hardly likely to be appreciated in some quarters is the fact that on account of the intimate connexion between the facts of astronomy and cyclic laws affecting human destiny, this science for long ages was one of the sacred sciences, and its deeper mysteries were carefully guarded--as they are still, for that matter. This last consideration throws an interesting light on the performance of Hipparchos (whom our text-books dub "the father of astronomy"), for he was not only silent as to the sources of his facts, but his data have been shown to be inconsistent with his methods, and are only explainable when calculated out on the principles enunciated in the _Sûrya-Siddhânta_. In short, he has been thus shown to have had access to Eastern sources of information, while at the same time some things were withheld.