evident enough that the older
Greek names of stars are derived from a time when the ancestors of the
Greeks were in the mental and imaginative condition of Iowas, Kanekas,
Bushmen, Murri, and New Zealanders. All these, and all other savage
peoples, believe in a kind of equality and intercommunion among all
things animate and inanimate. Stones are supposed in the Pacific
Islands to be male and female and to propagate their species. Animals
are believed to have human or superhuman intelligence, and speech, if
they choose to exercise the gift. Stars are just on the same footing,
and their movements are explained by the same ready system of
universal anthropomorphism. Stars, fishes, gods, heroes, men, trees,
clouds, and animals, all play their equal part in the confused dramas
of savage thought and savage mythology. Even in practical life the
change of a sorcerer into an animal is accepted as a familiar
phenomenon, and the power of soaring among the stars is one on which
the Australian Biraark, or the Eskimo Shaman, most plumes himself. It
is not wonderful that things which are held possible in daily practice
should be frequent features of mythology. Hence the ready invention
and belief of star-legends, which in their turn fix the names of the
heavenly bodies. Nothing more, except the extreme tenacity of
tradition and the inconvenience of changing a widely accepted name, is
needed to account for the human and animal names of the stars. The
Greeks received from the dateless past of savage intellect the myths,
and the names of the constellations, and we have taken them, without
inquiry, from the Greeks. Thus it happens that our celestial globes
are just as queer menageries as any globes could be that were
illustrated by Australians or American Indians, by Bushmen or Peruvian
aborigines, or Eskimo. It was savages, we may be tolerably certain,
who first handed to science the names of the constellations, and
provided Greece with the raw material of her astronomical myths--as
Bacon prettily says, that we listen to the harsh ideas of earlier
peoples 'blown softly through the flutes of the Grecians.'

This position has been disputed by Mr. Brown, in a work called _The
Law of Kosmic Order_. Mr. Brown's theory is that the early Accadians
named the zodiacal signs after certain myths and festivals connected
with the months. Thus the crab is a figure of 'the darkness power'
which seized the Accadian solar hero, Dumuzi, and 'which is con