II.

There is, then, in the first year, the new moon of the first month, which is the beginning of every cycle of nineteen years, on the six and twentieth day of the month called by the Egyptians Phamenoth.13 [The Church’s Easter-calculations created modern astronomy, which passed to the Arabians from the Church. (See Whewell’s Inductive Sciences.) They preserved it, but did not improve it, in Spain. Christianity re-adopted it, and the presbyter Copernicus new-created it. The court of Rome (not the Church Catholic) persecuted Galileo; but it did so under the lead of professional “Science,’” which had darkened the human mind, from the days of Pythagoras, respecting his more enlightened system.] But, according to the months of the Macedonians, it is on the two-and-twentieth day of Dystrus. And, as the Romans would say, it is on the eleventh day before the Kalends of April. Now the sun is found on the said six-and-twentieth day of Phamenoth, not only as having mounted to the first segment, but as already passing the fourth day in it. And this segment they are accustomed to call the first dodecatemorion (twelfth part), and the equinox, and the beginning of months, and the head of the cycle, and the starting-point14 The word is ἄφεσις, which Valesius makes equivalent to ἀφετηρια, the rope or post from which the chariots started in the race, and so = starting-point.—Tr. of the course of the planets. And the segment before this they call the last of the months, and the twelfth segment, and the last dodecatemorion, and the end of the circuit15 περιοδου. of the planets. And for this reason, also, we maintain that those who place the first month in it, and who determine the fourteenth day of the Paschal season by it, make no trivial or common blunder.