Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/708

690 part of the sphere that they could perceive above their horizon. Others, of a less advanced civilization, only named the more conspicuous groups of stars. They merely made a start. Yet the problem presented itself everywhere under the same aspect, for the solution was much of the same kind. Thus, the Scandinavians had a dog, a chariot, a cross, and a spindle in the sky. The Eskimos put seal-hunters there. The Makah Indians of the strait of San Juan de Fuca, living on the sea-coast, chose figures of fishes and cetaceans. The Aztecs and Mayas saw animals there, including a scorpion, which does not correspond with our constellation Scorpio. The Peruvians designated a jaguar, a cross-bearer, and a sheep suckling her lamb. The Puelches of Patagonia set ostrich-feathers in the Magellanic clouds. The Oceanian peoples applied figures to the constellations that impressed them.

These facts will lead the reader to ask if the resemblance presented by the configurations of some of the stars with familiar objects has not provoked comparisons of which the pictured sphere is a result. Thus, the constellation Gemini is composed of two lines of stars, each beginning with one of the first magnitude. There is a striking duality in this, which has seemed to suggest the same representative idea in many quarters. But the Accadians, who gave us the constellation of the Twins, did not figure it as we do, nor as the Tahitians do. Instead of arranging the brothers side by side, they opposed them foot to foot.

The small number of similitudes that we meet in the spheres of peoples distant from one another have an important significance. The Pleiades were nearly everywhere the first group that was remarked and named. The agglomeration of stars in it was of a nature to provoke the same kind of impressions. Yet different peoples attached different figures to it. The ancient Egyptians were struck by the idea of number, and, running into a prodigious exaggeration, called it by a name that signified thousands. In India they saw a hen and chickens in the group. This name spread thence to western Asia and then to Europe, and is still common. The similitudes were different in the New World. The Eskimos called the group the "bound together"; in a great part of North America the thought is of a dance—with the Iroquois, of men and women; with the Chokitapias, or Blackfeet, a sacred dance around the sacred seed. We may pertinently recollect that in classic antiquity Hyginus said that the Pleiades were so disposed as to seem to be dancing around.

The second stellar object that impressed primitive peoples is the milky way, which naturally suggests the idea of a road and a river. It is called the celestial river in China. To the ancient poets it was the stream of milk which Alemene spilled when nursing Hercules. To the philosophers it was the highway of souls,