The Sea Goat
That leads the Naiads and the Dryads forth.
Ben Jonson.
Very few constellations have come down to us unchanged in form through all the ages. An exception to this is found in the figure of Capricornus, which is generally depicted with the head and body of a goat and the tail of a fish.
Allen says that although we do not know when Capricornus came into the zodiac, we may be confident that it was millenniums ago, perhaps in prehistoric days. After Cancer it is the most inconspicuous constellation in the zodiac, and it seems strange on this account that these signs should have held such a place of importance in the minds of the ancients, and that they should have survived without change of figure the assaults of the ages that these stars have gazed upon.
The Capricorn which appears on the Babylonian boundary stones, the most ancient of all records extant, is to all intents and purposes identical in form with the Capricorn of a modern almanac.
According to Macrobius, the Chaldeans named the constellation "the Wild Goat," because that animal in feeding always ascends the hills, and is naturally a climbing animal. The sun in like manner when it arrives at Capricornus begins to mount the sky, and hence the goat was adopted as a symbol of the apparent climbing motion of the sun, while the fish-tail was significant of the rains and floods of the winter season.
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