Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 1.djvu/533

Rh rent postures, are still distinctly to be seen upon the pedestals everywhere among the ruins.

is not to be doubted, that hieroglyphics then, but not astronomy, were invented at Thebes, where the theory of the dog-star was particularly investigated, because connected with their rural year. Ptolemy * has preserved us an observation of an helaical rising of Sirius on the 4th day after the summer solstice, which answers to the 2250 year before Christ; and there are great reasons to believe the Thebans were good practical astronomers long before that period † ; early, as it may be thought, this gives to Thebes a much greater antiquity than does the chronicle of Axum just cited.

such observations were to be of service for ever, they became more valuable and useful in proportion to their priority. The most ancient of them would be of use to the astronomers of this day, for Sir Isaac Newton appeals to these of Chiron the Centaur. Equations may indeed be discovered in a number of centuries, which, by reason of the smallness of their quantities, may very probably have escaped the most attentive and scrupulous care of two or three generations; and many alterations in the starry firmament, old stars being nearly extinguished, and new emerging, would appear from a comparative state of the

v.i. 3 f

† Banbridge, Ann. canicul.
 * Uranologion. P. Petau.