[Footnote 18: So Virgil says of Sirius, or the dog-star, Geor. ii. 353:
hiulca siti findit Canis aestifer arva.
"Gassendi has well remarked," says Arnauld in his Logic, "that nothing
could be less probable than the notion that the dog-star is the cause of
the extraordinary heat which prevails in what are called the dog days,
because as Sirius is on the other side of the equator, the effects of
the star should be greatest at the places where it is most
perpendicular, whereas the dog days here are the winter season there.
Whence the inhabitants of those countries have much more reason to
believe that the dog-star brings cold than we have to believe that it
causes heat."]
[Footnote 19: The Shepherd's Calendar of Spenser: