Romulus may have been, it was impossible for them to depart greatly from the tropical year; because they watched the constellations, and connected with their rising and setting the seasons of agriculture, and the times of their religious festivals. Any alterations would be quickly perceived and the very observances of a religion, the gods of which presided over their secular employments, served as a balance-wheel to regulate the movements of their chronology."

We shall conclude this chapter with some account of the Zodiacs discovered by the scientific men who accompanied the French expedition to Egypt, and which were thought to give an age to the world much greater than the generally received system of chronology. We may here remark, that the evidence appears from other sources, to be pretty conclusive, that man has not inhabited the globe for more than about 6000 years, although the evidence is equally strong, that the globe itself, is, perhaps, millions of years old, and has been inhabited by a race of animals, and covered with a vegetation, entirely unknown at present. During the campaigns of the French army in Egypt, a Planisphere and Zodiac were discovered by Mons. V. Denon in the Great Temple of Dendera, or Tentyra, and copied in his "Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte, pendant les Campagnes du General Bonaparte." Paris, 1802, Fol. Vol. II. Plates, 130, 131, 132. Dendera, anciently the large city of Tentyra, is a town of Upper Egypt, situated at the edge of a small but fertile plain, about a mile from the left bank of the Nile, and 242 miles south of Cairo. Its Temple, magnificent even in ruins, is the first that the Egyptian traveler discovers on ascending the Nile; it is 265 feet in length and 140 feet in breadth, and has 180 windows, through each of which the sun enters in rotation, and then returns in a retrograde direction. The front of the Temple is adorned with a beautiful cornice and frieze, covered with hieroglyphics, over the centre of which is the winged globe; while the sides are decorated with compartments of sacrifices. In the front of the building is a massive portico, supported by 24 immense columns, in four rows, having circular shafts covered with hieroglyphics, square capitals resembling Egyptian Temples supported by four human heads

horned, and round foliated bases on square plinths. On the ceiling of this portico is the large Zodiac, partly carved and partly painted in natural colors, on a blue ground studded with yellow stars. The general design of the Zodiac is divided in two, and represents two female figures, which bend over the divisions, typical of Isis, or the year; with a winged globe placed against each, allusive to the sun entering his course. Each band of the Zodiac is divided into two, by a broad line covered with smaller hieroglyphics. On the upper division of the Zodiac, which is the broadest, are represented six of the Zodiacal signs; and under them, in the second division of the top band, are 19 boats, each carrying a figure significative of some astronomical appearance ; accompanied by an Egyptian inscription in a square. The constellations, and other heavenly bodies, were the Divinities of Egypt, and it was supposed that they performed their revolutions in boats. The other great band contains the six remaining signs of the Zodiac; and on its lower division are 19 other boats, as before. The Rev. Samuel Henley, in his very instructive and highly erudite remarks on this Zodiac, published in the Monthly and Philosophical Magazines, says, that these boats signify the nineteen years of the Metonic, or Lunar Cycle, which contains 6940 days; after which, the New and Full Moons, and other Aspects, are supposed to return to the same day of the Julian year. The smaller Zodiac, or rather Planisphere, is carved on the ceiling ⚫ of a separate quadrangular apartment on the east side of the Temple. It is of a circular form, and is supported by four human figures, standing, and eight kneeling, who have hawks heads. In both these Zodiacs the equinoctial points are in the constellation Leo, and it was by some inferred that they were constructed at the time when the sun entered this constellation at the equinox, or more than 9,700 years ago; about 4,000 years before the Mosaic record. These Zodiacs were brought away, and exhibited in the Louvre at Paris; and for a long time were the occasion of much discussion. All the speculations of infidel philosophers were, however, scattered to the winds by the discoveries of Champollion; and the dissertations of Visconti and Henley have proved, in opposition to the infidel arguments of Ripaud, Petau and Archer, that they are of

the age of Augustus Cæsar; and that they were erected in the Julian Year 4695, which then regulated the Egyptian, twentyfour years before the actual birth of our Savior, and twenty-eight years before the common era. All this is confirmed by the following Greek inscription, over the outer or southern portal of the Temple :-"On account of the Emperor Cæsar, God, the son of Jupiter, the Deliverer, when Publius Octavius being Governor, Marcus Claudius Posthumus Commander in Chief, and Tryphon General, the Deputies of the Metropolis consecrated, in virtue of the Law, the Propylæum to Isis, the greatest of Goddesses, and to the associated Gods on the Sacred Thoth." The Country of Egypt, had at that time become a Romish Province; and Augustus Cæsar, in the 31st year of his age and the 725th year of Rome, ordained that the Egyptian Thoth should for ever commence on the 29th of August.

THE SEASONS.

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CHAPTER VIII.

The Seasons.

"For this the golden sun the earth divides,

And, wheel'd through twelve bright signs, his chariot guides,
Five zones the heaven surround; the centre glows
With fire unquench'd and suns without repose:
At each extreme, the poles in tempest tost,
Dark with thick showers and unremitting frost:
Between the poles and blazing zone confined,
Lie climes to feeble man by Heaven assigned.
'Mid these the signs their course obliquely run,
And star the figured belt that binds the sun."

Sotheby's Virgil.

WE have, at length, arrived at that part of our work, which will treat upon and explain the phenomena of the seasons. All that we have said in the preceding chapters, has been preparatory to this, and, we trust, that there will not be less of beauty, or poetry, in our contemplations of those great changes which mark the rolling year, because we can understand the causes which produce them. To our own mind, there is no subject more delightful ⚫ than this, of the changing year; a theme, which is perhaps, still more endeared to us by the beautiful poetry of a Thompson, a Bloomfield, and a Cowper. A theme, which, even to Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shakspeare, and Milton, was a passion.

After the somewhat tedious detail and explanation, which has preceded, we feel, on approaching this always interesting subject, as Milton expresses it,

"As one who long in populous cities pent,

Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer morn, to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms."

To behold Nature as she is, and see the glorious changes which she wears, from the unsullied mantle of winter to the russet garb of autumn, we must quit the busy haunts of men, and leaving the

noisy streets and smoky cities, seek the country fields, and lanes. We have been much struck with a remark of Howitt, in his "Book of the Seasons," in which he thus deprecates the necessity that deprives our childhood of a contemplation of those beautiful changes which mark the year. "Oh that I could but touch a thousand bosoms with that melancholy which often visits mine, when I behold little children endeavoring to extract amusement from the very dust, and straws, and pebbles of squalid alleys, shut out from the free and glorious countenance of Nature, and think how differently the children of the peasantry are passing the golden hours of childhood; wandering with bare heads, and unshod feet, perhaps, but singing a childish, wordless melody,' through vernal lanes, or prying into a thousand sylvan, leafy nooks, by the liquid music of running waters, amidst the fragrant heath, or on the flowery lap of the meadow, occupied with winged wonders without end. Oh! that I could but baptize every heart with the sympathetic feeling of what the city pent child is condemned to lose; how blank, and poor, and joyless must be the images which fill its infant bosom, to that of the country one, whose mind

Will be a mansion for all lovely forms,
His memory be a dwelling-place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies!"

In the absence of a system of chronology to mark the returning periods of nature, the ancients were obliged to note the aspects of the stars. We have several times, in the preceding pages, referred to this, and we may now remark, that some of the most beautiful passages of the ancient poets, contain allusions to the stars as connected with agriculture. Hesiod, the oldest poet of the Greeks, has given a minute detail of the heliacal rising of the stars, accompanied with the most pleasing descriptions of the successive occupations of rural life. The name of the poem is, "Opera et Dies," the Works and Days. This poem Virgil has imitated, in the first and second". Georgics;" a word compounded of two Greek words, and meaning, works or labors of the earth, and corresponding almost exactly with our word agriculture. We shall give occasional quotations from both these poems, in our present chapter.