NOTES. 
239 
Ptolemies, in order to explain why Achilles Tatius 
speaks of the moans of the Egyptians at the festival 
of Isis, as a custom immutably connected with the 
period of the winter solstice. If moreover among the 
Mexicans we find no renewal of this apprehension 
of the approaching disappearance of the Sun till after 
fifty-two vague years, we may no doubt attribute it to 
the importance which every nation attaches to the end 
of a great cycle. We observe even at the present 
time, that the last day of the year bears with it an air 
of solemnity among nations very remote from supersti- 
tious ideas (Oeuvres de Boullanger, 1794, tom. 2. 
p. 6l). 
In Mexico, as well as at Thebes, the Sun is still con- 
siderably elevated at the period when its south declina- 
tion begins to diminish ; and we might say, that the 
fear of the total disappearance of this luminary ought 
rather to be excited in those regions of Asia, where 
Mr. Bailly places the origin of astronomy, than among 
the nations near the tropic. Nevertheless, it may be 
conceived how, in a worship, the symbols of which 
related to the state of the heavens, ideas of a pro- 
gressive lowering of the Sun, and the shortening the 
duration of the days, however little apparent these 
phenomena may be, lead to lugubrious ceremonies, to 
the expressions of sorrow and of fear. 
As to the asterism, to which different nations have 
assigned, at different periods, the first place in the 
zodiac, this is one of the most interesting investiga- 
tions in the history of astronomy. As years begin 
either by the solstices or by the equinoxes, the order 
of the signs, or rather the preference given to one of 
them which opens the march of the asterisms, fixes the 
date of the origin of the zodiac. Under this point of 
