rs of the wild goat, or Capricorn, those where the sun, having
reached the highest point in his annuary tract, rests at the summit
of the horary gnomon, and imitates the goat, who delights to climb the
summit of the rocks. He named stars of the balance, or libra, those
where the days and nights, being equal, seemed in equilibrium, like that
instrument; and stars of the scorpion, those where certain periodical
winds bring vapors, burning like the venom of the scorpion. In the same
manner he called by the name of rings and serpents the figured traces of
the orbits of the stars and the planets, and such was the general mode
of naming all the stars and even the planets, taken by groups or as
individuals, according to their relations with husbandry and terrestrial
objects, and according to the analogies which each nation found between
them and the objects of its particular soil and climate.*

* The ancients had verbs from the substantives crab, goat,
tortoise, as the French have at present the verbs serpenter,
coquetter. The history of all languages is nearly the same.

"From this it appeared that abject and terrestrial beings became
associated with the superior and powerful inhabitants of heaven; and
this association became stronger every day by the mechanism of language
and the constitution of the human mind. Men would say by a natural
metaphor: The bull spreads over the earth the germs of fecundity (in
spring) he restores vegetation and plenty: the lamb (or ram) delivers
the skies from the maleficent powers of winter; he saves the world from
the serpent (emblem of the humid season) and restores the empire of
goodness (summer, joyful season): the scorpion pours out his poison
on the earth, and scatters diseases and death. The same of all similar
effects.

"This language, understood by every one, was attended at first with no
inconvenience; but in the course of time, when the calendar had been
regulated, the people, who had no longer any need of observing the
heavens, lost sight of the original meaning of these expressions; and
the allegories remaining in common use became a fatal stumbling block to
the understanding and to reason. Habituated to associate to the symbols
the ideas of their archetypes, the mind at last confounded them: then
the same animals, whom fancy had transported to the skies, returned
again to the earth; but being thus returned, clothed in the livery of
the stars, they claimed the stel