AtjTRONOM V.

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transmigration, he likewise taught; and which thoughts wereadopted by Plato , and are most beautifully expressed byVirgil , JEn. iv. 7:24, &c. Georg, iv. 221: that the sun, themoon, the planets, and fixed stars, are all actuated by somedivinity, and move each in a transparent solid sphere, inthe order following: next to the Earth, the Moon , thenMercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars , Jupiter, Saturn; thesphere of fixed stai-s, the last of all : Ciceronis Nat. D. xiii.;Macrob. Sonin. Scip. ii. 4: that those move with a soundinconceivably beautiful, which our ears cannot comprehend.Those eight spheres, he imagined to be analogous to theeight notes in music, Cic. Sown. Scij). 5.; Macrobius , in loc.

Empedocles, the chief scholar of Pythagoras , enter-tertained the same sentiments with his master, concerningAstronomy. He is said to have thrown himself into thecrater of Mount iEtna, to make himself pass for a god ; orperhaps, which may approach nearer to truth, because liecould not discover the cause of the eruption ; or else in hisendeavours to discover the cause. Ilorat. Art. de Poetica,4G4. (>ne of his iron sandals being thrown up by the volcano,

the mode in which lie perished was discovered.

Pm LOLA li.s, also a scholar of Pythagoras , and of Ar-chytas, of Tarentum, Cic. Orat. iii. 34, first taught,publicly, the diurnal motion of the earth upon its axis,and its annual motion round the sun. This opinion Cicero ascribes to Nicetus, of Syracuse, and to Plato , Acad.iv. 30 ; which passage first suggested to Copernicus , theidea of that system which iie established.

Meteon, born at Leucoiue, a village near Athens, it issaid, first introduced in Europe the Lunar Cycle , con-sisting of nineteen solar years, or nineteen lunar years, andseven intercalary mouths: it had been first adopted by theChaldeans; Meteou published it at the Olympic games,where it was received with so great applause, that it wasthen universally adopted through the Grecian states, and theircolonies, and got the name of the Cycle, or GoldenNumber , to denote its excellence, which name it stillretains.

It was also called the Great Year, (Magnus annus velorbis;) Elian, x. 7.; which name was likewise applied tovarious spaces of time by different authors: by Virgil , lothe solar year, to distinguish it from the monthly revolutionof the moon. Serv. in Virg. JEn. i. 273. iii. 164 ; by Cicero ,and others to the revolution of 600 years, or 3600 years,called also several ages, when all the stars shall come tothe same position with respect to one another, as they were