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their universality, (thereby indicating a common origin, either 

 prior to the dispersion of mankind, or communicated from one 

 nation to another,) the lecturer referred to the change in the 

 position of the polai* star, arising from what is termed the 

 precession of the equinoxes. By this a clue was obtained to the 

 age of certain sculptures.] 



But the part of the heavens most observed, esteemed, and 

 probably the earliest mapped out, was that which we now call 

 the zodiac — the highway of all the heavenly bodies — in which 

 they would be most anxious to set up, so to speak, mile stones, 

 by which they might observe the motions of the sun, moon, 

 and planets. The very existence of such a zone amongst 

 ancient nations, is a strong proof of their astronomical attain- 

 ment. Not only must they have watched the motions of the 

 heavenly bodies, and invented constellations generally, for this 

 purpose, but they must have discovered the sun's path, or 

 ecliptic, in the heavens wliich divides the zodiac; and they 

 must have sufficiently watched the motions of the moon and 

 planets, to have assigned to them the limits within which they 

 always move. 



When we come to search into the annals of the several 

 nations of antiquity, not only do we find zodiacs, but we find 

 all those zodiacs divided into the same number of signs, 

 viz., twelve ; and not only so, but those twelve signs essentially 

 the same as those which we now employ."^ 



I will now draw your attention to the Egyptian zodiac, as 

 furnished by Kircher, in which the extreme similarity of the 

 signs is too remarkable to be passed over. There is nothing 

 in this zodiac to fix its date, beyond its sculpture ; but in 

 another drawing we have this supplied. It is the fragment of 

 a zodiac found in Eome, brought by the Roman army from 

 Egypt, but evidently rather of Chaldean than Egyptian sculp- 



* [The Indian astronomers adopted a double division of this portion of the celestial 

 sphere, viz. the zodiac referred to, and a lunar zodiac of twenty -seven parts, each of 

 which marked pretty nearly the diurnal motion of our satrllite.] — KnrTOR. 



