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Australians, Melanesians, Iowas, Amazon Indians, Eskimo, and the rest,
borrowed their human and animal stars from 'Akkadia.' The belief in
animal and human stars is practically universal among savages who have
not attained the 'Akkadian' degree of culture. The belief, as Mr. Tylor
has shown, {137} is a natural result of savage ideas. We therefore infer
that the 'Akkadians,' too, probably fell back for star-names on what they
inherited from the savage past. If the Greeks borrowed certain
star-names from the Akkadians, they also, like the Aryans of India,
retained plenty of savage star-myths of their own, fables derived from
the earliest astronomical guesses of early thought.

The first moment in astronomical science arrives when the savage, looking
at a star, says, like the child in the nursery poem, 'How I wonder what
you are!' The next moment comes when the savage has made his first rough
practical observations of the movements of the heavenly body. His third
step is to explain these to himself. Now science cannot offer any but a
fanciful explanation beyond the sphere of experience. The experience of
the savage is limited to the narrow world of his tribe, and of the
beasts, birds, and fishes of his district. His philosophy, therefore,
accounts for all phenomena on the supposition that the laws of the
animate nature he observes are working everywhere. But his observations,
misguided by his crude magical superstitions, have led him to believe in
a state of equality and kinship between men and animals, and even
inorganic things. He often worships the very beasts he slays; he
addresses them as if they understood him; he believes himself to be
descended from the animals, and of their kindred. These confused ideas
he applies to the stars, and recognises in them men like himself, or
beasts like those with which he conceives himself to be in such close
human relations. There is scarcely a bird or beast but the Red Indian or
the Australian will explain its peculiarities by a myth, like a page from
Ovid's 'Metamorphoses.' It was once a man or a woman, and has been
changed to bird or beast by a god or a magician. Men, again, have
originally been beasts, in his philosophy, and are descended from wolves,
frogs or serpents, or monkeys. The heavenly bodies are traced to
precisely the same sort of origin; and hence, we conclude, come their
strange animal names, and the strange myths about them which appear in
all anc