So long as Capella was used as the indicator star, so long the year must have begun with the sun in Taurus, the Bull; but when the re-adjustment was made, and the solar tropical year connected with the equinox was substituted for the sidereal year connected with the return of the sun to a particular star, it would be seen that the association of the beginning of the year with the sun's presence in any given constellation could no longer be kept up. The necessity for an artificial division of the zodiac would be felt, and that artificial division clearly was not made until the sun at the spring equinox was unmistakably in Aries, the Ram; or about 700 B.C. The eclipse of 1063 B.C. incidentally proves that the old method of fixing Nisan by the conjunction of the moon and Capella was then still in use; for the eclipse took place on July 31, which is called in the record "the 26th of Sivan." Sivan being the third month, its 26th day could not have fallen so late, if the year had begun with the equinox; but it would have so fallen if the Capella method were still in vogue. There is a set of symbols repeated over and over again on Babylonian monuments, and always given a position of eminence;--it is the so-called "Triad of Stars," a crescent lying on its back and two stars near it. They are seen very distinctly at the top of the photograph of the boundary-stone from the Louvre, given on p. 318, and also immediately above the head of the Sun-god in the photograph of the tablet from Sippar, on p. 322. Their significance is now clear. Four thousand years before the Christian era, the two Twin stars, Castor and Pollux, served as indicators of the first new moon of the year, just as Capella did two thousand years later. The "triad of stars," then, is simply a picture of what men saw, year after year, in the sunset sky at the beginning of the first month, six thousand years ago. It is the earliest record of an astronomical observation that has come down to us. [Illustration: WORSHIP OF THE SUN-GOD AT SIPPARA.] How simple and easy the observation was, and how distinctly the year was marked off by it! The month was marked off by the first sight of the new thin crescent in the evening sky. The day was marked off by the return of darkness, the evening hour in which, month by month, the new moon was first observed; so that "the evening and the morning were the first day." The year was marked off by the new moon being seen in the evening with a bright pair of stars, the stars we still know as the "Twins;" and the length of the year was shown by the evening of the month, when moon and stars came together. If on the first evening, it was a year of twelve months; if on the third, one of thirteen. There was a time when these three observations constituted the whole of primitive astronomy.