In this manner Pluche, generalizing some indications of the ancients, has imagined, that the Ram announces the commencement of the sun’s elevation, and the vernal equinox; that the Cancer indicates his retrogradation to the summer solstice; that the Balance, the sign of equality, marks the autumnal equinox[232]; and that the Capricorn, a climbing animal, indicates the winter solstice, after which the sun returns to us. According to this method, by placing the inventors of the zodiac in a temperate climate, we should have rains under Aquarius, the dropping of lambs and kids under the Gemini, violent heats under the Lion, gathering of the harvest under the Virgin, the time of hunting under the Sagittary, &c.; and the emblems would be appropriate enough. If we should then place the colures at the commencement of the constellations, or at least the equinox at the first stars of Aries, we should, in the first instance, arrive at a period of only 389 years before Christ, an epoch evidently too modern, and which would render it necessary to recur to a complete equinoxial period, or 26,000 years. But if the equinox be supposed to pass through the middle of the constellation, a period of about 1000 or 1200 years higher is obtained, 1600 or 1700 years before Christ; and this is what several celebrated men have believed to be the true epoch of the invention of the zodiac, the honour of which they have, for other reasons not sufficiently weighty, conferred upon Chiron. But Dupuis, who required for the origin which he endeavoured to attribute to all religions, that astronomy, and, in particular, the figures of the zodiac should in some measure have preceded all other human institutions, has sought another climate for the purpose of finding other explanations for the emblems, and for that of deducing another epoch from them. If, assuming the Balance as an equinoxial sign, but supposing it at the vernal equinox, it be presumed that the zodiac has been invented in Egypt, other sufficiently plausible explanations might in fact be found for the climate of that country.[233] The Capricorn, an animal with the tail of a fish, would mark the commencement of the rise of the Nile at the summer solstice; the Aquarius and Fishes, the progress and diminution of the inundation; the Bull, the time of labouring; the Virgin, the time of reaping; and they would mark them at the periods when these operations actually took place. In this system, the zodiac would have 15,000 years[234] for a sun supposed at the first degree of each sign, more than 16,000 for the middle, and 4000 only, on supposing that the emblem has been given to the sign at the opposite of which the sun was[235]. It is to the 15,000 years that Dupuis has attached himself; and it is upon this date that he has founded the whole system of his celebrated work.