s so drawn that Orion's
belt just fits his waist. But when he comes to look at the heavens,
the infant speculator sees no sort of likeness to a bear in the
stars, nor anything at all resembling a giant in the neighbourhood of
Orion. The most eccentric modern fancy which can detect what shapes it
will in clouds, is unable to find any likeness to human or animal
forms in the stars, and yet we call a great many of the stars by the
names of men and beasts and gods. Some resemblance to terrestrial
things, it is true, every one can behold in the heavens. _Corona_, for
example, is like a crown, or, as the Australian black fellows know, it
is like a boomerang, and we can understand why they give it the name
of that curious curved missile. The _Milky Way_, again, does resemble
a path in the sky; our English ancestors called it _Watling
Street_--the path of the Watlings, mythical giants--and Bushmen in
Africa and Red Men in North America name it the 'ashen path' or 'the
path of souls.' The ashes of the path, of course, are supposed to be
hot and glowing, not dead and black like the ash-paths of modern
running-grounds. Other and more recent names for certain
constellations are also intelligible. In Homer's time the Greeks had
two names for the _Great Bear_; they called it the _Bear_, or the
_Wain_: and a certain fanciful likeness to a wain may be made out,
though no resemblance to a bear is manifest. In the United States the
same constellation is popularly styled the _Dipper_, and every one may
observe the likeness to a dipper or toddy-ladle.

But these resemblances take us only a little way towards appellations.
We know that we derive many of the names straight from the Greek; but
whence did the Greeks get them? Some, it is said, from the Chaldaeans;
but whence did they reach the Chaldaeans? To this we shall return
later, but, as to early Greek star-lore, Goguet, the author of
_L'Origine des Lois_, a rather learned but too speculative work of the
last century, makes the following characteristic remarks: 'The Greeks
received their astronomy from Prometheus. This prince, as far as
history teaches us, made his observations on Mount Caucasus.' That was
the eighteenth century's method of interpreting mythology. The myth
preserved in the 'Prometheus Bound' of AEschylus tells us that Zeus
crucified the Titan on Mount Caucasus. The French philosopher,
rejecting the supernatural elements of the tale, makes up his mind
that Prometheus was