Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/710

692 seeming identity in the images are therefore reduced to a small number of comparisons. They are exceptional cases, in which the aspect of the asterism may have had something to do with the suggestion of similar images. Aside from this there is nothing in common: the figures set in the sky upon the constellations were peculiar to each people; they were arbitrary creations, and that proves that the outlines formed by the stars did not directly suggest either personages or animals by which the imagination was struck. Apart from a few geometrical figures—a quadrilateral, a triangle, or a cross—the configurations of the stars presented no relations with the objects selected to designate them. We are dealing, then, with a fanciful creation by each people, in which each one exhibited the peculiar tendencies of its imagination and genius.

This circumstance renders the nomenclature in question still more remarkable, since there is nothing or hardly anything in the aspect of the celestial tableau to provoke the construction of it. We return to the question with which we started: By what cause has a nomenclature so strange, unique in its kind, possessed, in a seemingly inevitable way, all the peoples who have looked into the sky? For we might predict, from the generality of the method, that if some new people, having everything to begin again, should start to construct its system of knowledge, it would again make a pictured sphere for the stars. I will not pretend to answer a question of scientific archæology that has not been sounded, not even outlined, till now. If I suggest a solution, it is simply as an essay and hint, leaving it to professional students of folk-lore to enlighten us more fully. It sometimes seems to me that we might draw some indications of a comparison between the manner in which places in hitherto uninhabited countries are named and the nomenclature of the stars.

When immigrants arrive in countries without inhabitants and unmapped, the first names given to the natural landmarks—the rivers, hills, clumps of trees, and rocks—are descriptive ones. These names often survive after the first arrivals have been dispersed and replaced by other peoples; and we know how ethnographers find, in geographical appellations, the track, the limits, and the language of the ancient inhabitants of a country. In such primary nomenclature, they say, for instance, the blue water, the green mountain, the brown rock, the cedar wood, the steep cliff, etc. It was the natural course, which has been followed everywhere. Why has the human mind taken a wholly different course for the sky? Was it not because the multiplicity of objects and their great resemblance had exhausted the series of descriptive terms? Multiplicity often confuses the judgment; for it is known that the view of the sky conveys the impression