1234 THEORY OF THE EARTH. 



Lion, the season when that country is most liable 

 to be overrun by ferocious animals, and so on *. 



The high antiquity of 15,000 years would be- 

 sides induce this absurd consequence, that [the 

 Egyptians, those men who represented every 

 thing by emblems, and who must have attached 

 a great importance to the circumstance that these 

 emblems were conformable to the ideas which 

 they were intended to represent, had preserved the 

 signs of the zodiac thousands of years after they 

 no longer in any way corresponded with their ori- 

 ginal signification. 



The late M. Renii Raige endeavoured to support 

 the opinion of Dupuis by an argument of an en- 

 tirely new kindf. Having remarked that signi- 

 fications more or less analogous to the figures of 

 the signs of the zodiac, might be found for the 

 Egyptian names of the months, on explaining 

 them by the oriental languages, and finding in 

 Ptolemy that epifi, which signifies Capricorn, 

 commences at the 20th of June, and therefore 

 comes immediately after the summer solstice, he 



* jEgyptiaca, p. 215. 



t See in the Great Work on Egypt, Antiq. Mem. vol. i., 

 the memoir of M. Remi Raige upon the nominal and ori- 

 ginal zodiac of the ancient Egyptians. See also the table 

 of the Greek, Roman, and Alexandrian months, in M. Hal- 

 ma's Ptolemy, vol. iii, 



