Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/709

Rh and had two gates, at the two places where it intersects the zodiac. The souls entered the world by the gate of the Twins (which corresponds with the sign Cancer), and left it to return to the gods by the gate of Sagittarius (sign of Capricorn). It is a little remarkable that some of the American nations also called the milky way the highway of souls; but it does not appear so singular upon reflection. The milky way certainly resembles a road in its shape. Let us now recollect that a large number of people consign the souls of their ancestors to the sky; hence the idea might easily have occurred frequently. There has also been a fortuitous and unconscious agreement among nations to give the name of the Bear to the most brilliant constellation in the neighborhood of the north pole. The primitive Sanskrit name of this constellation, according to Prof. Max Muller, meant "chariot," and this was the original image, which survives among some of our people to the present. But as the same word, rihsha, also designates a bear, there has sometimes been confusion, and the image of a bear was placed by the Greeks on the classic sphere. A bear was also represented by the principal North American Indian nations in the quadrilateral of this constellation. Only, these nations, who were familiar with the bear, did not include in the same constellation the three stars of what we call the tail, because the bear has only a very short tail, and this inclusion would have made it monstrous; so they fancied them three hunters pursuing the bear.

Now, is there anything extraordinary in the coincidence of like similitudes in the Old and New Worlds? "We do not think there is. The bear is a polar animal. The constellation is large, and demands a large symbol. Facts prove this, for the constellation was a reindeer with the Eskimos, an elk with the Indians of Puget Sound, and an elephant with the Hindoos. The fortuitous coincidence of names in two different centers does not, therefore, seem hard to explain. It only implies that there is a resemblance with the adopted image in the aspect of the constellation. We should also consider that, within the limits of a certain compass of ideas, the number of objects to which it is possible to recur is restricted, and two peoples may be led by chance to select the same symbol for the same group of stars. This is visibly the case with the constellation Cancer, which is represented in Japan by another crustacean, the many-fingered limulus.

I shall not insist upon the coincidence which La Condamine thought he had found, respecting the constellation Taurus, among some of the Indians of the Amazon. It is now understood that the term by which these Indians designated the Hyades did not mean a bull's jaw, but a tapir's. The examples of identity or of