e preservation of health as a point of the
first importance, and as indispensably necessary to the
practice of piety and the service of the gods. See his
account of Isis and Osiris, towards the end.

"Should it be asked at what epoch this system took its birth, we shall
answer on the testimony of the monuments of astronomy itself; that
its principles appear with certainty to have been established about
seventeen thousand years ago,* and if it be asked to what people it is
to be attributed, we shall answer that the same monuments, supported
by unanimous traditions, attribute it to the first tribes of Egypt; and
when reason finds in that country all the circumstances which could lead
to such a system; when it finds there a zone of sky, bordering on the
tropic, equally free from the rains of the equator and the fogs of
the North;** when it finds there a central point of the sphere of the
ancients, a salubrious climate, a great, but manageable river, a soil
fertile without art or labor, inundated without morbid exhalations, and
placed between two seas which communicate with the richest countries, it
conceives that the inhabitant of the Nile, addicted to agriculture
from the nature of his soil, to geometry from the annual necessity of
measuring his lands, to commerce from the facility of communications,
to astronomy from the state of his sky, always open to observation, must
have been the first to pass from the savage to the social state; and
consequently to attain the physical and moral sciences necessary to
civilized life.

* The historical orator follows here the opinion of M.
Dupuis, who, in his learned memoirs concerning the Origin of
the Constellations and Origin of all Worship, has assigned
many plausible reasons to prove that Libra was formerly the
sign of the vernal, and Aries of the autumnal equinox; that
is, that since the origin of the actual astronomical system,
the precession of the equinoxes has carried forward by seven
signs the primitive order of the zodiac. Now estimating the
precession at about seventy years and a half to a degree,
that is, 2,115 years to each sign; and observing that Aries
was in its fifteenth degree, 1,447 years before Christ, it
follows that the first degree of Libra could not have
coincided with the vernal equinox more lately than 15,194
years before Christ; now, if you add 1790 years since
C