If there were no evidence that ancient celestial spheres presented the constellations above referred to, I might be disposed to attach less weight to the coincidences here presented; but the ‘Phenomena’ of Aratus affords sufficient testimony on this point. In the first place, that work is of great antiquity, since Aratus flourished two centuries and a half before the Christian era; but it is well known that Aratus did not describe the results of his own observations. The positions of the constellations, as recorded by him, accord neither with the date at which he wrote nor with the latitude in which he lived. It is generally assumed—chiefly on the authority of Hipparchus—that Aratus borrowed his knowledge of astronomy from the sphere of Eudoxus; but we must go much farther back even than the date of Eudoxus, before we can find any correspondence between the appearance of the heavens and the description given by Aratus. Thus we may very fairly assume that the _origin_ of the constellations (as distinguished from their association with certain circles of the celestial sphere) may be placed at a date preceding, perhaps by many generations, that at which Homer flourished. Indeed, there have not been wanting those who find in the ancient constellations the record of the early history of man. According to their views, Orion is Nimrod—the ‘Giant,’ as the Arabic name of the constellation implies—the mighty hunter, as the dogs and hare beside him signify. The Centaur bearing a victim towards the altar is Noah; Argo, the stern of a ship, is the ark, as of old it might be seen on Mount Ararat. Corvus is the crow sent forth by Noah, and the bird is placed on Hydra’s back to show that there was no land on which it could set its foot. The figure now called Hercules, but of old Engonasin, or the kneeler, and described by Aratus as ‘a man doomed to labour,’ is Adam. His left foot treads on the dragon’s head, in token of the saying, ‘It shall bruise thy head; ‘and Serpentarius, or the serpent-bearer, is the promised seed. Of course, if we accept these views, we have no difficulty in understanding that a poet so ancient as Homer should refer to the constellations which still appear upon celestial spheres. And, in any case, the mere question of antiquity presents, as we have already shown, little difficulty. But there is one difficulty, a notice of which must close this paper, already carried far beyond the limits I had proposed to myself:—It may be thought remarkable that heroes of Greek mythology, as Perseus and Orion, should be placed by Homer, or even by Aratus, in spheres which are undoubtedly of eastern origin.