Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1830 Excerpt:... the death of Solomon (B.C. 979.) and according to my reckoning, the taking of Troy was but one generation earlier," p. 160. We miss, indeed, in his Chronology, that luminous arrangement, accuracy, and precision, which mark his earlier productions in philosophy and mathematics; for 979--884 = 95 years only. I have been thus particular in noticing and correcting the leading errors and defalcations in Newton's Grecian Chronology, because it is the most ingenious, and also the most elaborate, abstruse, and difficult part of the work; and because, from the imposing authority of his great name, it is still held in estimation by some respectable historians and chronologers. For although it has been censured by many of the learned--Whiston and Bedford, in 1728, the very year of its publication; Shuckford, in 1780; Atwell and Robinson, in 1737; Squire, in 1741; Costard, in 1746; Musgrave, in 1772; and Freret and Larcher, in France, either in the whole, or in part; yet still we find it adopted by the learned authors of the Ancient Universal History, and preferred by others since; by the ingenious Howard, in his Thoughts on the Structure of the Globe, 1797, by the latest and best historian of Greece, Mit/ord; and by a professed chronologer, Walker, so recently as 1796, who, though he censures some parts of the work, and justly rejects the supposed identity of Sesostris and Sesac, yet still adopts his subsequent dates of the Argonautic expedition, the return of the Heraclidce, and the destruction of Troy; and even reduces the date of the last to B.C. 900, four years later than Newton. He seems to have been led into this by a fond wish to vindicate the now generally acknowledged poetic licence of Virgil, in making "JEaieas coeval with Dido" although she...