to the probable dates of the invention of some part of their system, by means of the signs of the Zodiac, which were invented by them and which we will discuss more at length hereafter. We need only say at present that what is now the sign of spring, was not reckoned so with them, and that we can calculate how long ago it is that the sign they reckoned the spring sign was so. Semiramis also raised in the centre of Babylon a temple consecrated to Jupiter, whom the Babylonians called Bel. It was of an extraordinary height and served for an observatory. The whole edifice was constructed with great art in asphalte and brick. On its summit were placed the statues of Jupiter, Juno, and Rhea, covered with gold. The Egyptians have always been named as the earliest cultivators of astronomy by the Grecian writers, by whom the science has been handed down to us, and the Chaldaeans have even been said to have borrowed from them. The testimony of such writers however is not to be received implicitly, but to be weighed with the knowledge we may now obtain, as we have noticed above with respect to the Babylonians, from the actual records they have left us, whether by actual records, or by words and customs remaining to the present day. [Illustration: PLATE I.--BABYLONIAN ASTRONOMERS.] Herodotus declares that the Egyptians had made observations for 11,340 years and had seen the course of the sun change four times, and the ecliptic placed perpendicular to the equator. This is the style of statement on which opinions of the antiquity of Egyptian astronomy have been founded, and it is obviously unworthy of credit. Diodorus says that there is no country in which the positions and motions of the stars have been so accurately observed as in Egypt (_i.e._ to his knowledge). They have preserved, he says, for a great number of years registers in which their observations are recorded. Expositions are found in these registers of the motions of the planets, their revolutions and their stations, and, moreover, the relation which each bears to the birthdays of animals, and its good or evil influence. They often predicted the future with success. The earthquakes, inundations, the appearance of comets, and many other phenomena which it is impossible for the vulgar to know beforehand, were foreseen by them by means of the observations they had made over a long series of years.