There is a sort of outward resemblance between these three creatures, wide apart as they are anatomically from each other. They are all hard-shelled, creeping, and insignificant-looking animals. Why under any of these three forms a constellation of the Zodiac should have been depicted, it is difficult to conjecture; but if we have to admit that in Egyptian astronomy the beetle played the important part of marking as a constellation one of the quarters of the ecliptic circle, this admission will furnish us with an adequate reason for the extraordinary honour paid in Egyptian symbolic art to this lowly, and in itself unattractive, insect. The scarabæus, according to our hypothesis, marked in ancient calendrical tradition the spring equinox when in _conjunction_ with the sun, and the autumn equinox in _opposition_ to it. And it was as presiding _visibly in opposition_ that we may reasonably suppose it gained such honour in Egypt. For the autumn, not the spring, is in that land the time when vegetation begins to burst into life, and when all Egypt rejoices. I think, moreover, that facts connected with the worship of the Apis Bull will further strengthen the opinion that the Egyptians considered the constellations in _opposition_ to the sun to be those which presided over particular seasons and months.[110] [110] See below, pp. 234, 235. To trace allusions in the symbolic art of Egypt to Libra--the third in order of the constellations we are now discussing (see Plate XVII.)--is, it must be confessed, not so simple a matter, and it is with some diffidence that I put forward the following suggestion--_i.e._, that we may perhaps find in the “two feathers,” so prominent in Egyptian mythologic imagery, a reference to the two scales of the Balance (Libra). [Illustration: The Didû dressed.] In allegorical language _we_ speak often of the even scales of Justice, and in art the goddess is always represented with the Balance in her hand. In Egyptian symbolism and art, I think the two feathers represented the equal weights of the scales of Justice. In the great judgment hall of Osiris, the souls of men were weighed in the balance. The soul, or heart, of the dead Egyptian was placed in one scale, while a feather--or the figure of the goddess Mait, wearing on her head a single plume or feather--occupied the other. Mait was the goddess of Justice, and we often read also of “the two Maits who preside over Justice and Truth.” There is a woodcut in Prof. Maspero’s _Dawn of Civilization_, p. 130, in which the head-dress--the symbolic head-dress--so often to be met with in Egyptian mythologic representations, is very clearly drawn. It was in studying this woodcut that the idea first suggested itself to my mind, that in this head-dress we may find a reference to the four constellations which, when the Zodiac was first imagined, marked the four colures--the four quarters of the heavens--that it was in fact an astronomic monogram, combining four figures in one.