Page:Star Lore Of All Ages, 1911.pdf/227

Rh is a belief in early folk-lore that the crow alone among birds does not carry water to its young.

Corvus, Crater, and Hydra are generally associated together in the ancient myths and legends. Swartz, early in the 19th century, endeavoured to prove that the constellations were nothing but a sort of symbolical geography of the west shore of the Caspian Sea. He imagined that these three constellations represented strangely enough the petroleum wells of Baku. The long extended Serpent, with its coils and folds, represented to him the slow, oily flow of crude petroleum. The Cup is placed there to indicate the receptacle or reservoir for the oil, and the Crow is indicative of the inky blackness of the colour of the oil.

Dr. Seiss regards the Crow as the Bird of Doom, and it has been likened to Noah's Raven flying over the waste of waters, or alighting on Hydra, as there was no dry land for a resting place.

This association of the Crow with the bird that went forth from the Ark connects this constellation with several others that many authorities believe form a graphic account of the Deluge, and, just as in the Perseus and Andromeda group we seem to find a serial story, here is depicted in a like group the story of the Flood.

It certainly seems plausible that primitive man should have sought to record the greatest and most important events known to him for the benefit of posterity, and it may have occurred to some ancient patriarch, and possibly Noah, to inscribe his record on the enduring scroll of night, and burn the legend deep with the fire of the silver stars.

At any rate, there is a significant arrangement of constellations in this region of the heavens, that requires little imagination to convey a fairly good record of the Deluge story, as we have it in Genesis.

Here we have the Ship (the Ark), Argo, stranded upon a rock. Two birds hover near-by, the Raven and the Dove, the birds sent forth by Noah. We have a sacrifice offered