Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/451

 The Celestial Bear. 103

tion suggested to his mind that four of these stars look like a four- footed animal seen in profile, but what animal ? Gradually he may have noticed that the alignment of certain stars behind them resem- bles the form of a den, that the animal seems to be descending from this den in spring just when the bears, which he had hunted, de- scend from theirs, that it falls over in autumn just at the time when bears are most easily killed, etc. In a sentence, he then noticed all the similarities between the positions of the stars and the habits of the bear which the Micmac legend so faithfully portrays, and these similarities once noted, when he again asked himself the question, " What animal do those four stars represent ? " the answer came readily, " It must be the bear, because its stars act so like a bear, and besides there is its den ; no other animal has a den of that shape." This is a general concept. It would be quite as likely to be reached by a native of Europe or Asia as by a native of America, for in equal latitudes on all those continents the positions of the stars have the same relations to the habits of the bear. It is almost certainly the true explanation of the naming of these stars by the Micmacs ; whether it explains the name elsewhere is for the reader to judge. If it does, the argument for intercommunication loses a promising example, and must meet the question : why may not other seeming instances of intercommunication be explained on a similar basis ? But it will be observed that the farther south we go the less marked become the seasons, and therefore the less satisfactory becomes this explanation. It may also be objected to this explanation, as applied to the classic Ursa Major, that we have no evidence that these stars were ever associated with the seasons in the parts of Europe and Asia where they were so called. If this statement be correct, we can only suppose that this association was forgotten there when ad- vancing civilization diminished both the necessity for hunting and the number of the bears. But at least both the mythology and the grouping of the classic constellations indicate that the pursuit of the bear was the main concept in Ursa Major and Bootes. Such are a few of the points of interest connected with the legend of the Stellar Bear, after all only a small chapter in the grand and wonder- ful book of stellar mythology.

Stansbwy Hagar. 7 Lefferts Place, Brooklyn, N. Y.

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