NOTES. liii 







Roman Antiquity, in which the name of the Balance as a zodiacal sign 

 occurs, the passage of Hipparchus (Comment, in Araturn, lib. iii. cap. 2), in 

 which there is mention of the Srjpiov which holds the Centaur (by his fore- 

 foot), as well as the remarkable passage of Ptolemy, lib. ix. cap. 7 (Halma, 

 T. ii. p. 170). In this latter passage the southern Balance is named, with 

 the addition Kara XaXdaiovQ, and is opposed to the Pincers (Scheeren) of 

 the Scorpion, in an observation certainly not made in Babylon, but by the 

 astrological Chaldeans scattered in Syria and Alexandria (Vues des Cordilleres 

 et Monumens des peuples indigenes de 1'Amerique, T. ii. p. 380). Buttmann 

 was disposed to think, but which seems little probable, that the %;Xat had 

 originally signified the two scales of the Balance, and were afterwards by a 

 misunderstanding converted into the pincers of a scorpion. (Compare Ideler 

 " Untersuchungen iiber die astronomischen Beobachtungen der Alien, " 

 S. 374, and the same writer, " iiber die Sternnamen," S. 174 177, with 

 Carteron, " Recherches de M. Letronne," p. 113). In the analogy between 

 many names of the twenty-seven " houses of the moon," and the Dodeca- 

 tomery of the zodiac, it has always appeared to me remarkable that we find 

 the sign of the Balance among the certainly very ancient Indian Nakschatras 

 (moon-houses). (Vues des Cordilleres, T. ii. p. 612.) 



( 196 ) p. 104. Compare A. W. von Schlegel iiber Sternbilder des Thier- 

 kreises im alten Indien, in der Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 

 Bd. i. Heft 3, 1837, and his Commentatio de Zodiaci antiquitate et origine, 

 1839, with Adolph Holtzmann iiber den griechischen Ursprung des indischen 

 Thierkreises, 1841, S. 9, 16, and 23. In the last-named work, it is said : 

 The passages adduced from the Amarakoscha and the Ramayana are not of 

 doubtful interpretation they speak in the clearest terms of the zodiacal circle 

 itself; but if the works which contain them were composed before the know- 

 ledge of the Greek Zodiac could have reached India, it ought to be closely 

 examined whether those passages are not more recent interpolations." 



( 197 ) p. 105 Compare Buttmann in the Berlin Astron. Jahrbuch for 

 1822, S. 93; Olbers, on the more modern constellations, in Schumacher's 

 Jahrbuch for 1840, S. 238251, and Sir John Herschel, Revision and Re- 

 arrangement of the Constellations with special reference to those of the 

 Southern Hemisphere, in the Memoirs of the Astr. Soc., Vol. xii. p. 201 

 224 (with a very exact distribution of the Southern Stars of the 1st to 4th 

 magnitudes). On the occasion of the formal discussion between Lalande and 

 Bode, respecting the introduction of Lalande's house-cat and of a harvest- 

 man (Messier!), Olbers complains, that in order to make room for new 



