

404 COSMOS. 



move the Moon, the Sun, and Jive other sfars, which have 

 received the name of planets; the whole, therefore, in seveu 

 revolutions." 3 In the old Pythagorean representation of the 

 celestial system, according to Philolaus, the five planets were 

 mentioned in a similar manner among the ten deified bodies 

 which revolve round the central fire (the focus of the 

 universe, 6<n/a) " immediately beneath the region of fixed 

 stars;"* these were succeeded by the Sun, Moon, Earth, 

 and the avriyQwv (the anti-Earth). Even Ptolemy always 

 speaks of only five planets. The enumeration of the 

 planets in systems of seven, as Julius Firmicus distri- 

 buted them among the decani, 5 as they are represented 

 in the zodiacal circle of Bianchini (probably of the third 

 century after Christ), examined by myself elsewhere,* and 

 as they are met with in the Egyptian monuments of the 

 time of the Caesars, does not belong to the ancient astronomy, 

 but to the subsequent epochs, in which astrological chimeras 

 had become universally diffused. 7 We must not be surprised 



* Plato, in the Timceus, p. 38, Steph. Davis's translation, 

 ed. Bonn, p. 342. 



4 Bockh, de Platonico systemate ccelestium globorum et de 

 vera indole astronomice Philolaicce, p. xvii., and the same in 

 Philolaus, 1819, p. 99. 



5 Jul. Firmicus Maternus, Astron., libriviii. (ed. Pruckner, 

 Basil, 1551), lib. ii. cap. 4, of the time of Constantine the 

 Great. 



6 Humboldt, Monumens des peuples indigenes de VAmerique, 

 vol. ii. pp. 42-49. I have already directed attention in 1812 

 to the analogy between the zodiac of Bianchini and that of 

 Dendera. Compare Letronne, Observations critiques sur les 

 representations zodiacales, p. 97; and Lepsius, Ohronologie 

 der JEgypter, 1849, p. 80. 



7 Letronne, Sur I Origine du Zodiaque grec, p. 29. Lep- 

 sius, Chronol. der JEgypt., p. 83. Letronne opposes the old 

 Chaldean origin of the planetary week on account of tLe 

 number seven. 



