Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/108

96 past, when history and writing were unknown, we are, I think, approaching the boundaries of scientific archæology.

Every reader of Virgil knows that the Greeks were not merely orators, but that with a pair of compasses they could describe the movements of the heavens and fix the rising of the stars; but when by modern astronomy we can determine the heliacal rising of some well-known star, with which the worship in some given ancient temple is known to have been connected, and can fix its position on the horizon at some particular spot, say, three thousand years ago, and then find that the axis of the temple is directed exactly toward that spot, we have some trustworthy scientific evidence that the temple in question must have been erected at a date approximately 1100 years If on or close to the same site we find that more than one temple was erected, each having a different orientation, these variations, following, as they may fairly be presumed to do, the changing position of the rising of the dominant star, will also afford a guide as to the chronological order of the different foundations. The researches of Mr. Penrose seem to show that in certain Greek temples, of which the date of foundation is known from history, the actual orientation corresponds with that theoretically deduced from astronomical data. Sir J. Norman Lockyer has shown that what holds good for Greek temples applies to many of far earlier date in Egypt, though up to the present time hardly a sufficient number of accurate observations have been made to justify us in foreseeing all the instructive results that may be expected to arise from astronomy coming to the aid of archæology. The intimate connection of archæology with other sciences is in no case so evident as with respect to geology, for when considering subjects such as those I shall presently discuss it is almost impossible to say where the one science ends and the other begins.

By the application of geological methods many archæological questions relating even to subjects on the borders of the historical period have been satisfactorily solved. A careful examination of the limits of the area over which its smaller coins are found has led to the position of many an ancient Greek city being accurately ascertained; while in England it has only been by treating the coins of the ancient Britons, belonging to a period before the Roman occupation, as if they were actual fossils that the territories under the dominion of the various kings and princes who struck them have been approximately determined. In arranging the chronological sequence of these coins, the evolution of their types—a process almost as remarkable, and certainly as well defined, as any to be found in Nature—has served as an efficient guide. I may venture to add that the results obtained from the study of the