Page:Star Lore Of All Ages, 1911.pdf/274

196 His body, consumed with fire, was found by the nymphs of the place, who honoured him with a decent burial. His sisters, the Heliades, mourned his unhappy end, and were changed by Jupiter into poplars, the trees that are found in great abundance in the valley of the Po.

It is said that the tears of the Heliades were turned to amber. Apollonius represented the Argonauts as passing along the banks of the River Eridanus in their voyage from Ister to the Rhone, and as hearing the lament of the Heliades, and seeing their amber tears.

Amber was imported into Greece from the northern shores of the Adriatic, and it was naturally identified with the River Po, the great river of northern Italy.

It is also related that when Hercules went on his quest of the golden apples of Hesperides, he came to the River Eridanus, and enquired his way of the nymphs dwelling near-by.

Burritt thinks that the fable of Phaëton alludes to some extraordinary period of drought and heat which was experienced in a very remote time, and of which only this confused tradition has descended to later times.

The constellation Eridanus is so extended that it has been divided, for the sake of convenience, into a northern and southern stream. The former has its source near the first magnitude star Rigel, in the foot of Orion, and hence Eridanus has been sometimes called "the River of Orion."

Maunder considers that if we regard Eridanus as representing the Flood, and the sacrifice of Andromeda a means to cause its abatement, then Eridanus would stand for the Great Deep of the Primeval Chaos, of which the sea monsters typified the indwelling principle.

The Arab name for this constellation was "Al-Nahr, meaning the River, and the Arabs also imagined that the