NOTES. 
237 
nected with physical phenomena must have lost 
all interest with the people, if they were cele- 
brated sometimes at one season, and sometimes at 
anotlmr. On the banks of the Nile, as well as 
those of the Tiber, distinetions were doubtless made 
between the festivals attached to the date of a month 
(fence stativce), and those announced by the priests 
at the periods pointed out by the motives of their 
institution. These latter festivals were named among 
the Romans f erics conceptivce ; and a distinction was 
made between the sementivce, the paganalia, and the 
compitalia (Marini, Atti de Fratelli Arvali, tom. 1, 
p. 126). In Egypt, the festival of Thoth, which shared 
with the month of this name the whole of the sea- 
sons during the sothic period, did not probably coin- 
cide with a festival celebrated in honour of the helia- 
cal rising of Sirius. Is it likely, that processions, in 
which the emblems of water were the most prominent, 
took place in times of the greatest drought ? The 
passage of Geminus, it is true, is very explicit : 
BotAovra* yag (oj ’Aiyv^T'iot) ^vfficcg TOig 0aot{ xoircc 
Tov ccvTov jcojtgoi; Tot» hiavTov yhscfixf aAAa vcccruv tuv tow 
svioiVTov <yg«v xcct yiveadtxt tvv eo^7^v, xotl pjjeiftsg/vsJv, 
Kou xuh Icrgtvjjv (Elcm. Astronoiu. cap. 6). 
Geminus of Rhodes, who lived in the time of Sylla 
and Cicero, censures Eudoxus, and the Greeks in ge- 
neral, for having supposed, that the feast of Isis cor- 
responded constantly to the winter solstice; while, ac- 
cording to the vague year, it must have run through 
thirty days in the space of a hundred and twenty 
years. But if it were admitted, that all the festivals, 
which correspond to the seasons and the astrono- 
mical phenomena, were attached to the dates of the 
months of Phamenoth, Pachon, or Mechir, what be- 
