162 COSMOS. 



1 9 r to 23 3 ), which are inconveniently grouped to the north 

 and south of the ecliptic, either at great distances from 

 each other, or, like Taurus and Aries, Aquarius and Capri- 

 cornus, so closely crowded together as almost to encroach on 

 each other. These circumstances prove that catasterisms 

 previously formed were converted into signs of the zodiac. 



The sign of Libra, according to Letronne's conjecture, 

 was introduced at the time of, and perhaps by Hip- 

 parchus. It is never mentioned by Eudoxus, Archimedes, 

 Autolycus, or even by Hipparchus in the few fragments of 

 his writings which have been transmitted to us (excepting 

 indeed in one passage, probably falsified by a copyist.)" 

 The earliest notice of this new constellation occurs in 



* On the passage referred to in the text, and interpolated 

 b) a copyist of Hipparchus, see Letronne, Orig. du Zod., 1840, 

 p. 20. As early as 1812, when I was much disposed to 

 believe that the Greeks had been long acquainted with the 

 sign of Libra, I directed attention in an elaborate memoir 

 (on all the passages in Greek and Roman writers of an- 

 tiquity, in which the Balance occurs as a sign of the 

 zodiac) to that passage in Hipparchus ( Comment, in Aratum, 

 lib. iii. cap. 2) which refers to the 6rjpt6v held by the Centaur 

 (in his fore-foot) as well as to the remarkable passage of 

 Ptolemy, lib. ix. cap. 7 (Halma, t. ii. p. 170). In the latter 

 the Southern Balance is named with the affix Kara Xa\8aiovs, 

 and is opposed to the pincers of the Scorpion in an observation, 

 which was undoubtedly not made at Babylon, but by some of 

 the astrological Chaldeans, dispersed throughout Syria and 

 Alexandria. ( Vues des Cordilleres et Monumens des peuples indi- 

 enes de VAmerique, t. ii. p. 380.) Buttman maintained, what 

 the 



is very improbable, that the x 1 ?^ * originally signified the two 

 scales of the Balance, and were subsequently by some miscon- 

 ception converted into the pincers of a Scorpion. (Compare 

 Ideler, Untersuchungen uber die astronomischen Beobachtungen 

 der Alien., s. 374, and Ueber die Sternnamen, s. 174-177, with 

 Carteron, Recherches de M. Letronne, p. 113.) It is a remark- 

 able circumstance connected with the analogy between 



