OF THE COSMOS. GROUPING OF THE FIXED STARS. 105 



in Geminus and Yarro, hardly half a century before our 

 Era ; and as the Romans soon after this date, from Augustus 

 to Antoninus, became vehemently attached to astrology, 

 those constellations " which lay along the Sun's celestial 

 path" grew into a heightened fanciful importance. To the 

 first half of this period of the Roman Empire belong the 

 Egyptian zodiacal figures of Dendera, Esne, the Propylon of 

 Panopolis, and some mnmmy cases, as was asserted by 

 Yisconti and Testa at a time when all the materials for the 

 decision of the question had not yet been collected, and 

 when wild hypotheses prevailed respecting the signification 

 of those symbolical zodiacal signs, and their dependence on 

 the precession of the equinoxes. Prom Adolph Holtzmann's 

 acute researches, the high antiquity which, from passages in 

 Menu's Institutes, Yalmiki's Ramayana, and Amarasinha's 

 Dictionary, August Wilhelm von Schlegel had attributed to 

 zodiacs found in India, has become very doubtful. ( 196 ) 



The artificial grouping of stars in constellations which, 

 in the course of centuries, has taken place in so accidental 

 a manner, the often inconvenient magnitude and uncertain 

 outlines of these figures, the confused nomenclature of 

 separate stars in the constellations, with the exhaustion of 

 several alphabets, as in the Ship Argo, the incongruous 

 mixture of mythical personages with the plain prose of 

 physical instruments, chemical furnaces, and pendulum 

 clocks, in the southern hemisphere, have several times led 

 to proposals for a new division of the celestial sphere, which 

 should be entirely without imaginary figures. Por the 

 southern hemisphere, where only Scorpio, Sagittarius, Cen- 

 taurus, Argo, and Eridanus, have ancient poetic possession, 

 the enterprise would seem less hazardous. ( 1 . 97 ) 



