e in their magnitude, and their apparent
countlessness. The most uneducated eye, when raised to the starry
heavens on a clear night, fixes here and there upon groups of stars: in
the north, Cassiopeia, the Great Bear, the Pleiades--below the Equator,
the Southern Cross--must at all times have impressed those who beheld
them with a certain sense of unity. Thus the idea of a "constellation"
is formed; and this once done, the mind naturally progresses in the same
direction, and little by little the whole sky is mapped out into certain
portions or districts to which names are given--names taken from some
resemblance, real or fancied, between the shapes of the several groups
and objects familiar to the early observers. This branch of practical
astronomy is termed "uranography" by moderns; its utility is very
considerable; thus and thus only can we particularize the individual
stars of which we wish to speak; thus and thus only can we retain in
our memory the general arrangement of the stars and their positions
relatively to each other.

There is reason to believe that in the early Babylonian astronomy
the subject of uranography occupied a prominent place. The Chaldaean
astronomers not only seized on and named those natural groups which
force themselves upon the eye, but artificially arranged the whole
heavens into a certain number of constellations or asterisms. The very
system of uranography which maintains itself to the present day on our
celestial globes and maps, and which is still acknowledged--albeit under
protest--in the nomenclature of scientific astronomers, came in all
probability from this source, reaching us from the Arabians, who took
it from the Greeks who derived it from the Babylonians. The Zodiacal
constellations at any rate, or those through which the sun's course lies
would seem to have had this origin; and many of them may be distinctly
recognized on Babylonian monuments which are plainly of a stellar
character. The accompanying representation, taken from a conical black
stone in the British Museum [PLATE XX., Fig. 2.], and belonging to the
twelfth century before our era, is not perhaps, strictly speaking, a
zodiac, but it is almost certainly an arrangement of constellations
according to the forms assigned them in Babylonian uranography. [PLATE
XXI.] The Ram, the Bull, the Scorpion, the Serpent, the Dog, the Arrow,
the Eagle or Vulture may all be detected on the stone in question, as
may similar forms var