colure

Updated: May 5, 2025

This difference, which is so insensible in a year, becomes pretty considerable in time; and in threescore and twelve years the difference is found to be of one degree, that is to say, the three hundred and sixtieth part of the circumference of the whole heaven. Thus after seventy-two years the colure of the vernal equinox which passed through a fixed star, corresponds with another fixed star.

Voltaire - Letters on England

And as the equinoctial colure passed through the middle of Aries, when that sphere was constructed, he infers, by calculations of their retrograde motion from their place then till the year A.D. 1690, that the expedition took place in 937 before Christ. To this, however, there seem to be insurmountable objections, which it is surprising did not occur to this great man.

Robert Kerr - A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels - Volume 18 : Historical Sketch of the Progress of Discovery, Navigation, and : Commerce, from the Earliest Records to the Beginning of the Nineteenth : Century, By William Stevenson

All this being laid down, the only thing remaining to settle chronology is to see through what star the colure of the equinoxes passes, and where it intersects at this time the ecliptic in the spring; and to discover whether some ancient writer does not tell us in what point the ecliptic was intersected in his time, by the same colure of the equinoxes.

Voltaire - Letters on England