nhabit the depopulated cities of Samaria, "and the
men of Babylon made Succoth-benoth." The Rabbis are said to have
rendered this by the "booths of the Maidens," or the "tents of the
Daughters,"--the Pleiades being the maidens in question.

Generally they are the Seven Sisters. Hesiod calls them the Seven
Virgins, and the Virgin Stars. The names given to the individual stars
are those of the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione; thus Milton terms
them the Seven Atlantic Sisters.

As we have seen (p. 189), the device associated expressly with Joseph is
the Bull, and Jacob's blessing to his son has been sometimes rendered--

"Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well;
_the daughters walk upon the bull_."

That is, "the Seven Sisters," the Pleiades, are on the shoulder of
Taurus.

Aratus wrote of the number of the Pleiades--

"Seven paths aloft men say they take,
Yet six alone are viewed by mortal eyes.
From Zeus' abode no star unknown is lost,
Since first from birth we heard, but thus the tale is told."

[Illustration: STARS OF THE PLEIADES.]

Euripides speaks of these "seven paths," and Eratosthenes calls them
"the seven-starred Pleiad," although he describes one as
"All-Invisible." There is a surprisingly universal tradition that they
"were seven who now are six." We find it not only in ancient Greece and
Italy, but also among the black fellows of Australia, the Malays of
Borneo, and the negroes of the Gold Coast. There must be some reason to
account for this widespread tradition. Some of the stars are known to be
slightly variable, and one of the fainter stars in the cluster may have
shone more brightly in olden time;--the gaseous spectrum of Pleione
renders it credible that this star may once have had great brilliancy.
Alcyone, now the brightest star in the cluster, was not mentioned by
Ptolemy among the four brightest Pleiads of his day. The six now visible
to ordinary sight are Alcyone, Electra, Atlas, Maia, Merope and Taygeta.
Celoeno is the next in brightness, and the present candidate for the
seventh place. By good sight, several more may be made out: thus
Maestlin, the tutor of Kepler, mapped eleven before the invention of the
telescope, and in our own day Carrington and Denning have counted
fourteen with the naked eye.

In clear mountain atmosphere more than seven would be seen by any
keen-sighted observer. Usually six stars may be made out with the