]30 ON SHE REVOLUTION'S OF 



subsequent periods. Thus, according to Mr. H;imilton, Virgo would 

 represent tlie land of Egypt wlieu it is not fertilized by the inunda- 

 tion; the Leo, the season when thi>i land is most infested by wild 

 beasts, &c.* 



The remote antiquity of 15,000 years would besides involve this 

 absurd consequence, tliat the Egyptians, men who represented every 

 thing by emblems, and who attached a vast importance to the con- 

 formity of these emblems witli the ideas which they intended to por- 

 tray, must have preserved the signs of the zodiac for thousands of 

 years after they had ceased in any manner to correspond with tlie 

 original signification. 



The late Remi Raige endeavoured to support Dupuis' opinion by an 

 entirely novel argument f. Having observed that we may find, in 

 explaining the Egyptian days of the month by the oriental languages, 

 meanings more or less analogous to the figures of the zodiacal signs, 

 and finding from Ptolemseus that epifi, which signifies Capricornus, 

 begins on the twentieth of June, and consequently immediately fol- 

 lows the summer solstice ; he draws the conclusion, that at the 

 beginning Capricornus himself was at the summer solstice, and thus 

 of the other signs, as Dupuis had done before him. 



But, independently of all conjecture of these etymologies, Raige 

 did not observe that it was merely chance, that five years after the 

 battle of Actiurn, in the year 25 before Christ, at the establishing of 

 the fixed Alexandrian year, the first day of Thoth was found to cor- 

 respond with the twenty-ninth of August of the Julian )'e:ir, and con- 

 tinued ever since to correspond. It is only from this epoch that the 

 Egyptian months began from fixed days of the Julian year, at Alexan- 

 dria only; and Ptolemsens himself did not discontinue to employ in 

 his Almagest the ancient Egyptian year, with its indefinite months %. 



Why may not, at some epoch, the names of the signs have been 

 given to the months, or the names of the months to the signs, in as 

 arbitrary a manner as the Indians have given to their twenty-seven 



*iEgyptiaca, page 215. 



•f- See the great work on Egypt. Ant. Mem. v. 1, the Memoir of M. Remi Raige, 

 on the ' Nominal and Primitive Zodiac of the Ancient Egyptians.' See also the 

 table of the Greek, Roman, and Alexandrian months, iu the Ptolemseus of Halma, 

 vol. iii. 



X See ' Ideler's Researches on the Astronomical Observations of the Ancients,' a 

 translation of which has been inserted by M. Halma, in the third volume of his 

 Pcolemjeus ; and particularly the Memoir of Freret on the opinion of Lanauze, re- 

 lative to the establishing of the Alexandrian year, in the Memoir of the Academy of 

 Belles Lettres, vol. xvi. p. 308. 



