Here we have the difficulty which has met everybody in going back into these old records, because there was no absolute necessity for a common language at the time; it was open to everyone to call the stars any name they chose in any country, therefore it is difficult for scholars to find out what particular stars or constellations were meant by any particular words. In the Revised Version, Arcturus has given place to "the Bear with its train," and even our most distinguished scholars do not know what Mazzaroth means. I wrote to Professor Robertson Smith to ask him to give me the benefit of his great knowledge, and he tells me that Mazzaroth is probably that band of stars round the ecliptic or round the equator to which I have referred, but he will only commit himself to the statement that it is a probable enough conjecture; other people believe that it was a reference to the Milky Way. I mention this to show how very difficult this inquiry really is. The "seven stars" are held by many to mean the Pleiades, and not the Great Bear; but this, I think, is very improbable. Much is to be hoped from the study of the Babylonian records in relation to the Egyptian ones. This is a point I shall return to in the sequel. In observing stars nowadays, we use a transit circle which is carried round by the earth so as to pick up the stars in different circles round the axis of the earth prolonged, and by altering the inclination of the telescope of this instrument we can first get a circle of one declination and then a circle of another. The Egyptians did not usually employ meridian observations. Did the Egyptians make star maps? They certainly did, as we shall see. The first bit of solid information specially bearing upon ancient Egyptian constellations was gained at the temple of Denderah, a place which the traveller up the Nile reaches before he arrives so far as Thebes. Perhaps among the reasons why so great attention was given to the so-called zodiacs of Denderah was the fact that one of them, having been rudely wrenched from its resting-place in the platform of one of the temples, had been carried to the museum in Paris, so that the thing itself was _en évidence_ and capable of being examined by experts whose opinions were of value, and by all the world besides.