tlers. But, as we have seen, an exact knowledge of the stars has
always been useful if not essential to savages; and we venture to
doubt whether they would confuse their nomenclature and sacred
traditions by borrowing terms from trappers and squatters. But, if
this is improbable, it seems almost impossible that all savage races
should have borrowed their whole conception of the heavenly bodies
from the myths of Greece. It is thus that Egede, a missionary of the
last century, describes the Eskimo philosophy of the stars: 'The
notions that the Greenlanders have as to the origin of the heavenly
lights--as sun, moon, and stars--are very nonsensical; in that they
pretend they have formerly been as many of their own ancestors, who,
on different accounts, were lifted up to heaven, and became such
glorious celestial bodies.' Again, he writes: 'Their notions about the
stars are that some of them have been men, and others different sorts
of animals and fishes.' But every reader of Ovid knows that this was
the very mythical theory of the Greeks and Romans. The Egyptians,
again, worshipped Osiris, Isis, and the rest as _ancestors_, and there
are even modern scholars, like Mr. Loftie in his _Essay of Scarabs_,
who hold Osiris to have been originally a real historical person. But
the Egyptian priests who showed Plutarch the grave of Osiris, showed
him, too, the stars into which Osiris, Isis, and Horus had been
metamorphosed. Here, then, we have Greeks, Egyptians, and Eskimo, all
agreed about the origin of the heavenly lights, all of opinion that
'they have formerly been as many of their own ancestors.'

The Australian general theory is: 'Of the good men and women, after
the deluge, Pundjel (a kind of Zeus, or rather a sort of Prometheus of
Australian mythology) made stars. Sorcerers (_Biraark_) can tell which
stars were once good men and women.' Here the sorcerers have the same
knowledge as the Egyptian priests. Again, just as among the
Arcadians, 'the progenitors of the existing tribes, whether birds, or
beasts, or men, were set in the sky, and made to shine as stars.'[146]

We have already given some Australian examples in the stories of the
_Pleiades_, and of _Castor_ and _Pollux_. We may add the case of the
_Eagle_. In Greece the _Eagle_ was the bird of Zeus, who carried off
Ganymede to be the cup-bearer of Olympus. Among the Australians this
same constellation is called _Totyarguil_; he was a man who, when
bathing, was killed b