Mr. Brough Smyth (_Aborigines of Victoria_), _Turree_ (_Castor_)
and _Wanjel_ (_Pollux_) are two young men who pursue _Purra_ and kill
him at the commencement of the great heat. _Coonar toorung_ (the
mirage) is the smoke of the fire by which they roast him. In Greece it
was not Castor and Pollux, but _Orion_ who was the great hunter placed
among the stars. Among the Bushmen of South Africa, _Castor_ and
_Pollux_ are not young men, but young women, the wives of the Eland,
the great native antelope. In Greek star-stories the _Great Bear_
keeps watch, Homer says, on the hunter Orion for fear of a sudden
attack. But how did the Bear get its name in Greece? According to
Hesiod, the oldest Greek poet after Homer, the Bear was once a lady,
daughter of Lycaon, King of Arcadia. She was a nymph of the train of
chaste Artemis, but yielded to the love of Zeus, and became the
ancestress of all the Arcadians. Changed by Zeus to a bestial form,
she was shot by Artemis, and then translated by Zeus to the stars
(Apollod., iii. 8; Eustath., 1156; Bachofen, _Der Baer_, p. 14).[144]
Here we must notice first, that the Arcadians, like Australians, Red
Indians, and other wild races, and like the Bedouins, believed
themselves to be descended from a girl who became an animal. That the
early Egyptians did the same is not improbable; for names of animals
are found among the ancestors in the very oldest genealogical
papyrus,[145] as in the genealogies of the old English kings. Next the
Arcadians transferred the ancestral bear to the heavens, and, in doing
this, they resembled the Peruvians, of whom Acosta says: 'They adored
the star _Urchuchilly_, feigning it to be a _Ram_, and worshipped two
others, and say that one of them is a _sheep_, and the other a lamb
... others worshipped the star called the _Tiger_. _They were of
opinion that there was not any beast or bird upon the earth, whose
shape or image did not shine in the heavens._'

But to return to our bears. The Australians have, properly speaking,
no bears, though the animal called the native bear is looked up to by
the aborigines with superstitious regard. But among the North American
Indians, as the old missionaries Lafitau and Charlevoix observed, 'the
four stars in front of our constellation are a bear; those in the tail
are hunters who pursue him; the small star apart is the pot in which
they mean to cook him.'

It may be held that the Red Men derived their bear from the European
set