﻿THE INDIAN ZODIAC. $Ot 



of course to the middlemost. It is not meant that 

 the division of the Hindu Zodiac into such spaces is 

 exact to a minute, or that every star of each asterism 

 must necessarily be found in the space to which it be- 

 longs ; but the computation will be accurate enough 

 for our purpose, and no lunar mansion can be very re- 

 mote from the path of the moon. How Father Sou- 

 ciet could dream that Visafha was in the Northern 

 Crown, I can hardly comprehend ; but it surpas- 

 ses all comprehension that M. Bailly should copy his 

 dream, and give reasons to support it ; especially as 

 four stars, arranged pretty much like those in the I?i- 

 dian figure, present themselves obviously near the Ba - 

 lance, or the Scorpion. 1 have not the boldness to ex- 

 hibit the individual starsin each mansion, distinguished 

 in Bayer's, method, by Greek letters, because, though 

 I have little doubt that the five stars of AsIcs/ia, in 

 the form of a wheel, are *, y, £, a, e, of the Lion, and 

 those of Mula y, e, o, £ <p, t, c, v, o, |, w, of the Sagittary : 

 and though I think many of the others equally clear, 

 yet, where the number of stars in a mansion is less 

 than three, or even than four, it is not easy to fix on 

 them with confidence; and I must wait, until some 

 young Hindu astronomer, with a good memory and 

 good eyes, can attend my leisure on serene nights at 

 the proper seasons, to point out in the firmament it- 

 self the several stars of all the constellations for which 

 he can find names in the Sanscrit language. The only 

 stars, except those in the Zodiac, that have yet been 

 distinctly named to me, are the Septarshi, Dhruva, 

 Arundhali, llsh/.-upaJ, Matrhnandel ; and, in the 

 southern hemisphere, Agastya, or Canopus. The 

 twenty-seven Yoga stars, indeed, have particular 

 names, in the order of the nacshafras, to which they 

 belong; and since we learn* that the Hindus have 



* See p, 270. 



