30 

 tlieless, still quotes the aucient equinox as if it yet existed : — 



" CaniliUus auratis aperit cum comibus auauiu 

 Taurus *' 



Oeorgic. lib. i. v. 216. 



He is speaking of the first new moon rising together with the 

 sun : — 



" When the third night she rises to her sphere, 

 And with his horns the Bull unbars the year." 



But all this conspires to prove what is sufficient for our pur- 

 pose, viz., that there was once such a time when the sun upon 

 the head of the Lion and the Bull marked that extremely 

 ancient period when the solstice and the vernal equinox were 

 situated as far back as the last degrees of Leo and Taurus. 

 This period, according to the Septuagint chronology, was 

 about six hundred years before the deluge ; according to the 

 Hebrew chronology, it was a few hundred years only after the 

 creation ; and in either case, the traditionary remembrance of 

 this period would be renewed immediately after the flood, 

 when the sun at these seasons had not yet passed out of the 

 same signs — when " the sweet influence of the Pleiades" still 

 lingered on the face of nature ; and when the time should 

 arrive at which men regarded the planetary influences with 

 superstitious reverence, these signs we should certainly expect 

 would be amongst the most esteemed emblems. 



Nor was it long before this state of things arrived. Our 

 next step conducts us to the period when astronomy became 

 perverted to the superstitions of astrology. Too soon, in 

 BabeFs proud and growing territory, the influences of the 

 planets at particular seasons on the face of nature, was ex- 

 tended by the sages, and believed by the people to extend to 

 the lives of men. Tiie haughty tower of Babel, probably the 

 first post-deluvian observatory — the ruins of which still exist. 



