nd,
secondly, the language in its infancy and poverty, had no expressions
for so many new and metaphysical ideas. Necessity, the usual stimulus
of genius, surmounted everything. Having remarked that in the annual
revolution, the renewal and periodical appearance of terrestrial
productions were constantly associated with the rising and setting
of certain stars, and to their position as relative to the sun, the
fundamental term of all comparison, the mind by a natural operation
connected in thought these terrestrial and celestial objects, which were
connected in fact; and applying to them a common sign, it gave to the
stars, and their groups, the names of the terrestrial objects to which
they answered.*

* "The ancients," says Maimonides, "directing all their
attention to agriculture, gave names to the stars derived
from their occupation during the year." More Neb. pars 3.

"Thus the Ethopian of Thebes named stars of inundation, or Aquarius,
those stars under which the Nile began to overflow;* stars of the ox or
the bull, those under which they began to plow; stars of the lion, those
under which that animal, driven from the desert by thirst, appeared on
the banks of the Nile; stars of the sheaf, or of the harvest virgin,
those of the reaping season; stars of the lamb, stars of the two kids,
those under which these precious animals were brought forth: and thus
was resolved the first part of the difficulty.

* This must have been June.

"Moreover, man having remarked in the beings which surrounded him
certain qualities distinctive and proper to each species, and having
thence derived a name by which to designate them, he found in the same
source an ingenious mode of generalizing his ideas; and transferring
the name already invented to every thing which bore any resemblance or
analogy, he enriched his language with a perpetual round of metaphors.

"Thus the same Ethiopian having observed that the return of the
inundation always corresponded with the rising of a beautiful star
which appeared towards the source of the Nile, and seemed to warn the
husbandman against the coming waters, he compared this action to that
of the animal who, by his barking, gives notice of danger, and he called
this star the dog, the barker (Sirius). In the same manner he named the
stars of the crab, those where the sun, having arrived at the tropic,
retreated by a slow retrograde motion like the crab or cancer. He
named sta