this new-year's festival of the dead among various nations, and its connection, with the Pleiades. We have seen that in India November is called the month of the Pleiades. Now on the 17th day of that month is celebrated the Hindoo Durga, a festival of the dead, and said by Greswell to have been a new-year's commemoration at the earliest time to which Indian calendars can be carried back. Among the ancient Egyptians the same day was very noticeable, and they took care to regulate their solar calendars that it might remain unchanged. Numerous altered calendars have been discovered, but they are all regulated by this one day. This was determined by the culmination of the Pleiades at midnight. On this day commenced the solemn festival of the Isia, which, like the _corroborees_ of the Australians, lasted three days, and was celebrated in honour of the dead, and of Osiris, the lord of tombs. Now the month Athyr was undoubtedly connected with the Pleiades, being that "in which the Pleiades are most distinct"--that is, in which they rise near and before sunset. Among the Egyptians, however, more attention was paid to astronomy than amongst the savage races with which the year of the Pleiades would appear to have originated, and they studied very carefully the connection between the positions of the stars and the entrance of the sun into the northern hemisphere, and regulated their calendar accordingly; as we shall see shortly in speaking of the pyramid builders. The Persians formerly called the month of November _Mordad_, the angel of death, and the feast of the dead took place at the same time as in Peru, and was considered a new-year's festival. It commenced also in the evening. In Ceylon a combined festival of agriculture and of the dead takes place at the beginning of November. Among the better known of the ancient nations of the northern hemispheres, such as the Greeks and Romans, the anomaly of having the beginning of the year at the autumnal equinox seems to have induced them to make a change to that of spring, and with this change has followed the festival of the dead, although some traces of it were left in November.