two months later, either on account of some local circumstances in the
climate of Abyssinia, or of the length of its course, from the country
of Berber, or 17.5 degrees of latitude, to the bifurcation of the
delta. The Arabian geographers assert that in Sennaar and in Abyssinia
the Nile begins to swell in the month of April (nearly as the
Orinoco); the rise, however, does not become sensible at Cairo till
toward the summer solstice; and the water attains its greatest height
at the end of the month of September.* (* Nearly eighty or ninety days
after the summer solstice.) The river keeps at the same level till the
middle of October; and is at its minimum in April and May, a period
when the rivers of Guiana begin to swell anew. It may be seen from
this rapid statement, that, notwithstanding the retardation caused by
the form of the natural channels, and by local climatic circumstances,
the great phenomenon of the oscillations of the rivers of the torrid
zone is everywhere the same. In the two zodiacs vulgarly called the
Tartar and Chaldean, or Egyptian (in the zodiac which contains the
sign of the Rat, an in that which contains those of the Fishes and
Aquarius), particular constellations are consecrated to the periodical
overflowings of the rivers. Real cycles, divisions of time, have been
gradually transformed into divisions of space; but the generality of
the physical phenomena of the risings seems to prove that the zodiac
which has been transmitted to us by the Greeks, and which, by the
precession of the equinoxes, becomes an historical monument of high
antiquity, may have taken birth far from Thebes, and from the sacred
valley of the Nile. In the zodiacs of the New World--in the Mexican,
for instance, of which we discover the vestiges in the signs of the
days, and the periodical series which they compose--there are also
signs of rain and of inundation corresponding to the Chou (Rat) of the
Chinese* and Thibetan cycle of Tse, and to the Fishes and Aquarius of
the dodecatemorion. (* The figure of water itself is often substituted