To the establishment of this week the assumption of seven wandering stars has no doubt largely contributed. The priests had discovered that besides Sun, Moon, and Venus, four other stars shift their position on the firmament with reference to the fixed stars, which latter appear always to maintain their relative distances. These four wandering stars were Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each day in the week was dedicated to one of the seven wandering stars and received its name. These names have been maintained to the present day, for instance, Sunday, the Sun’s day, Monday, the Moon’s day, etc. The lunar calendar, established through religious considerations, supplanted the more rational one, which latter, however, survived in Egypt, and was reinstated in the Occident during the French revolution, although unfortunately only for a short time (1793–1805). As a result, the synodical month, in order to suit the calendar, has been changed not only with half a day to thirty days, but also with one and a half days to twenty-eight days. If decades had been adhered to we would have had months of even thirty days and either five leap months of thirty-one days each (during leap year six) or half a decade interpolated at new year. Besides the seven wandering stars known to antiquity (at present over eight hundred planets have been observed), several other stars and constellations played an important part. The Magellanic clouds, considered of evil nature, and the Pleiades appealed already to the Australian negroes. In the northern hemisphere, where the opportunity of observing the Magellanic clouds is small, situated as they are near the South Pole, the Pleiades have attracted the greater attention and the Phœnicians especially appear to have taken interest in this constellation. From them, reverence for the Pleiades spread to a large part of Africa, where we now to our surprise find this star cluster reproduced along with symbols of Sun, Moon, and Venus. Homer also mentions the Pleiades and a few other constellations, namely, the Hyades, Orion, the Great Bear, and the stars Sirius and Arcturus. At all events, the Pleiades have frequently occupied a unique position in the old world. Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens, and Canopus, the second in brightness, also belonging to the southern hemisphere but only half as far removed from the South Pole as Sirius, have both evoked the attention and the worship of the primitive people, in this case the South Africans.