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Show THERE'S NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN. The Popular Science Monthly for June publishes extracts from the address of Chief Justice Daly, before the Geographical Society, in which he says: From one of these books, compiled after the manner of our modern encyclopedias, and the compilation of which is shown to have been made more than two hundred years B. C., it has been ascertained, what has long been supposed, that Chaldea was the parent land of astronomy; for it is found, from this compilation and from other bricks, that the Babylonians catalogued the stars, and distinguished and named the constellations; that they arranged the twelve constellations that form our present zodiac to show the course of the sun's path in the heavens; divided time into weeks, months and years; that they divided the week, as we now have it, into seven days, six being days of labor, and the seventh a day of rest, to which they gave a name from which we have derived our word "Sabbath," and which day, as a day of rest from all labor of every kind, they observed as rigorously as the Jew or the Puritan. The motion of the heavenly bodies and the phenomena of the weather were noted down, and a connection, as I have before stated, detected, as M. de Perville claims to have discovered, between the weather and the changes of the moon. They invented heavenly bodies, the water-clock to measure time, and they speak in this work of the spots on the sun, a fact they could only have known by the aid of telescopes, which it is supposed they possessed, from observations that they have noted down on the rising of Venus and the fact that Layard found a crystal lens in the ruins of Nineveh. These "bricks" contain an account of the deluge, substantially the same as th narrative in the Bible, except that the names are different. They disclose that houses and lands were then sold, leased and mortgaged, that money was loaned at interest, and that the market gardeners, to use an American phrase, "worked on shares," that the farmer, when plowing with his oxen, beguiled his labor with short and homely songs, two of which have been found, and connect this very remote civilization with the usages of to-day. |