David P Todd

Astronomy David P Todd

Like life itself we do not know when astronomy began; we cannot conceive a time when it was not. Man of the early stone age must have begun to observe sun, moon, and stars, because all the bodies of the cosmos were there, then as now. With his intellectual birth astronomy was born. Onward through the childhood of the race he began to think on the things he observed, to make crude records of times and seasons; the Chaldeans and Chinese began each their own system of astronomy, the causes of things and the reasons underlying phenomena began to attract attention, and astronomy was cultivated not for its own sake, but because of its practical utility in supplying the data necessary to accurate astrological prediction. Belief in astrology was universal.