G'2^ PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1775. 



Sin ortu quarto, namque is certissimus auctor, 



Pura neque obtiisis per coelum cornibus ibit, 



Totus et ille dies, et qui nascentur ab illo, 



Exactum ad mensem pluvia ventisque carebunt. 



Georgic. lib. 1, lin. 143. 

 But in this he contradicts Aratus, whose authority in general he follows im- 

 plicitly. With Aratus, the signs of the new moon extend only to the first 

 quarter. 



The ancients ascribed an influence to the constellations and fixed stars as well 

 as to the sun and moon ; and there seems to have been much the same founda- 

 tion for one as the other. In the parapegmata or calendars, introduced in 

 Greece, as we learn from Theon,* by the astronomer Meton, and renewed 

 either annually, or as I rather conjecture, at the expiration of every 1 Q year 

 period, the heliacal risings and settings of different stars were marked as bring- 

 ing in different sorts of weather. The truth is, the earliest astronomers imagined, 

 that the weather was governed by the sun, and that its varieties were every where 

 owing to the different degrees of the sun's heat in the different seasons. They 

 had therefore taken great pains to collect, by a long series of observations, the 

 weather that usually prevailed in this or that particular place during the sun's 

 passage through every degree of every sign. Upon these observations, not upon 

 any whimsical theory of celestial influences, the predictions in the calendars 

 were founded. It seemed reasonable to announce, as the weather of each part 

 of the year, what had been found to be then most frequent. And while the 

 civil reckonings of time were so different among the different Greek states, and 

 so rudely digested in all, the heliacal risings and settings of the stars were the 

 only certain and obvious marks, the compilers of those popular directories could 

 hit upon, of the sun's return to the different parts of the zodiac.-^ Hence they 

 proposed them to people as signals of the weather to be expected. The form of 

 the year being now the same in all parts of Europe, and pretty accurately ad- 

 justed to the motions of the heavenly bodies, and the heliacal risings and settings 

 of the stars, from the different manner of life of our country people, not falling 

 so much under popular observation with us, as they did among the Greeks, they 

 are not marked as prognostics in our modern almanacks : and this I take to be 

 the reason, that though the moon hath maintained her reputation among us, 

 the influence of the fixed stars is sunk, as it well deserves, in utter oblivion. 

 On the whole I do not deny, that the observant husbandman will find a variety 

 of useful prognostics in the appearances of the moon, and the heavenly bodies 

 in general ; but they will be prognostics of no other kind, and for no other 



* Scholia in Aratum. — Orig. + Geminus. Et'o-uyiyii ji'i tu <pa»ii*»u. c. 14. — Orig. 



