a prince of a scientific bent, and that he
established his observatory on the frosty Caucasus. But, even
admitting this, why did Prometheus give the stars animal names? Goguet
easily explains this by a hypothetical account of the manners of
primitive men. 'The earliest peoples,' he says, 'must have used
writing for purposes of astronomical science. They would be content to
design the constellations of which they wished to speak by the
hieroglyphical symbols of their names; hence the constellations have
insensibly taken the names of the chief symbols.' Thus, a drawing of a
bear or a swan was the hieroglyphic of the name of a star, or group of
stars. But whence came the name which was represented by the
hieroglyphic? That is precisely what our author forgets to tell us.
But he remarks that the meaning of the hieroglyphic came to be
forgotten, and 'the symbols gave rise to all the ridiculous tales
about the heavenly signs.' This explanation is attained by the process
of reasoning in a vicious circle from hypothetical premises
ascertained to be false. All the known savages of the world, even
those which have scarcely the elements of picture-writing, call the
constellations by the names of men and animals, and all tell
'ridiculous tales' to account for the names.

As the star-stories told by the Greeks, the ancient Egyptians, and
other civilised people of the old world, exactly correspond in
character, and sometimes even in incident, with the star-stories of
modern savages, we have the choice of three hypothesis to explain this
curious coincidence. Perhaps the star-stories, about nymphs changed
into bears, and bears changed into stars, were invented by the
civilised races of old, and gradually found their way amongst people
like the Eskimo, and the Australians, and Bushmen. Or it may be
insisted that the ancestors of Australians, Eskimo, and Bushmen were
once civilised, like the Greeks and Egyptians, and invented
star-stories, still remembered by their degenerate descendants. These
are the two forms of the explanation which will be advanced by persons
who believe that the star-stories were originally the fruit of the
civilised imagination. The third theory would be, that the 'ridiculous
tales' about the stars were originally the work of the savage
imagination, and that the Greeks, Chaldaeans, and Egyptians, when they
became civilised, retained the old myths that their ancestors had
invented when they were savages. In favou